io81

I have always liked the coin laundry mat,  (a coin laundry mat is the washing machine that you operate by inserting your clothes and a small fee) the ones you get in the states, but dont ask me why:P So one day i figured would a coin operated laundry mat work in Kuwait? Before i start researching any business i would always ask people around me about the idea and i start my search from there. Everybody said”imagine a Kuwaiti going to a coin laundry dropping his boxers there” (note: dont tell them that you have done it in the states:P) so they may have a point, but what about the unskilled workers in Kuwait, they are about 1 million. Dont they wash theirclothes? some idiots even said NO they dont!, because he is calculating the normal laundry expenses and relating it to a guy with a 80 KD salary. So i had to know if the idea works or not but one major problem was the language barrier which i had to face. So i made a simple questionnaire which included questions like, do you wash your clothes in a laundry? if you do how often? how much do you spend monthly on the laundry? then after i went and translated the questionnaire into 5 languages. Indian: tamil malayalam, hindu, urdu then comes Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Singalese. I even had a hard time getting the questionnaire done, i had to label each to know what language it was. So i took of to Kuwait city and some places in salmiya. The strange thing that came out was, every body used a laundry, and they paid an average of 5kd per month for the service which included 4 to 5 pieces of clothing only per week, they had delivery service too but was very slow, slow i mean it takes a week! most had monthly subscription fees, and an employee passes by on a bike to pick the clothes of the workers each day. So as you can see there is a hidden system there, so my next question is do you think a coin operated laundry mat would work? paying 500fils to wash more than 10 pieces of clothing, but then you have to dry and iron them too, would such an idea be accepted?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 13th, 2007 at 9:47 am and is filed under New Concepts & Idea's, Retail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.