LAUNDRY ROOM COINLESS CARD SYSTEMS

If you've used a MetroCard to pay for a subway ride, you already know the basics behind smart cards: You put money into a vending machine, indicate how much you want to add to your card, and the machine gives you back a piece of plastic you can then use to operate the washer or dryer. Each time you do a load of laundry, the balance on your card is deducted by the price of a load of wash. Refill it using the same machine when the balance gets low.

Such vending machines and card readers, called value transfer machines (VTMs), are expensive, ranging from $3,300 to $7,000 - generally limiting laundry vendors to installing them in buildings with over 50 units, and arranging longer-term contracts than with regular laundry rooms. But vendors, not surprisingly, claim the upgrade is worthwhile, arguing that the cards provide better accountability and audits, more convenience for residents, more revenue for the building, less downtime and fewer service calls.

Mark Sperry, vice president of the New Jersey-based laundry vendor The Fowler Companies, says smart-card systems are better than cash systems at preventing graft, since they keeps a digital record of deposits, making it difficult for anyone to be skimming without it being flagged. As well, he says, card-users load up their cards in advance, and that revenue is counted up and processed regardless of whether or not the washers or dryers are used.

When property manager Judith Straus alerted her shareholders about the switchover from coins to cards via a notice, she says nobody protested the abandonment of quarters. Straus told the shareholders that the co-op would bill them for a $50 laundry card unless they said they weren't interested. "People who opted out did so because they didn't use the laundry room," she says. "Nobody opted out because they didn't like the idea of using the cards."

Get Smart

Board president Greg Pace says his building was so eager to switch to cards, it was even willing to offer the laundry company a higher percentage of the monthly revenue in order to convince them to retrofit the machines. The building eventually didn't need to do that, and Pace says the switchover has been worthwhile for both the co-op and the vendor. He himself, he says, has used up a $50 card in the six weeks that the system has been in place, and suggests that because the quarter scavenger hunt has been eliminated, "people are washing more, they're doing smaller loads…. It's really been a convenience for the homeowners and I think it'll work out in the end for the laundry company, too."

If your board wants to make the switch to smart cards, contact your manager. If you're already under contract with a laundry company, negotiate the possibility of upgrading your existing system. If your laundry vendor thinks your building meets its criteria, then your existing washers and dryers need to be modified to accept the smart cards and a VTM needs to be installed in the laundry room. This work usually takes only a few days, and costs the co-op nothing. Most types of VTMs take only cash, because there needs to be a dedicated phone line installed to verify credit-card transactions.