Perhaps it's just a sign of the times, or the way we do laundry, but laundromats are an ever-increasingly rare sight here in Ireland.
It's very rare that an apartment doesn't have a washing machine and dryer or washer-dryer.
Many of them are now gone or have morphed into normal dry cleaners without any self-service, and offer 'service wash' laundry (they do everything) which are mostly used for over-sized items like duvets, large curtains/drapes etc. Or, if you want to get all of your laundry pressed too e.g. you've loads of shirts, they can be kind of handier than doing the laundry at home.
Although, I have used laundrettes/laundromats them I was in London and Paris. I had a washer-dryer in both apartments, but its drying abilities were EXTREMELY over rated. Basically, like a washing machine with a hairdryer built in
In general European laundromats are rather uneventful places in my experience. Front loaders aren't so finicky about how much laundry you put in and in general the commercial versions are practically indestructible. If you stuff them full, they'll still generally do a reasonable job of washing your clothes and there's no risk of doing them any damage unless you try to wash bricks (although nothing would surprise me!)
I do remember being pretty horrified when these two female Aussi back packers came over to me and asked "it's going around but the clothes aren't getting wet" ... They'd put their dirty laundry & a large scoop of Persil into a laundromat dryer. It couldn't have been more obvious that it was a dryer, it was one of the really huge ones with TUMBLE DRYER written on the front.
I had to explain in baby steps that it was a dryer. They were confused because they'd 'only ever seen mom use the one where your clothes go in the top'
Then they were wondering if you needed different machines for different types of laundry, or if you could put them all in the same machine, or if you could just set the machines differently!
OMG they were thick!
I also saw a Laundromat owner in Paris going absolutely mad as someone had put dye into two Mieles via the detergent dispenser chamber.
There was a LOT of shouting in French and demanding names and addresses for the repair bill
In general though, anytime I have had to use one, they are pretty uneventful.
Commercial machines over here tend to have much shorter, wetter cycles than domestic/residential models.
E.g. it's not unusual for the machines to be setup to do two short washes then a lot of deep rinsing.
Because they're bolt-down machines, they don't need to worry too much about ramping up spins etc, so they just open a gravity drain and go straight into spin with lots of water in the drum ... looks far more interesting than a residential model.
They're also almost always hot fill which obviously saves a lot of time.
