Polar Cleaners

I’m on the down side of middle age, and I haven’t had to use a laundromat for a really long time, apart from the occasional hotel laundry room while on vacation. The washing machine at our house died right before some of us were about to leave town for a funeral, so our hand was forced. This place was closest to home.
There are some new washing machines, which you can identify by the photocopied notes hanging above them: «NEW MACHINES $ 3.25». They looked like they would hold more than the others and maybe be more reliable, so okay. We used four of them.
The machines I have encountered on vacation had dollar bill slots. These NEW machines? All quarters. They don’t go in easily, either. Each one has to be weighed, m assessed, judged, and then if not good enough, you push the return button and it will spit it out. Do the math; that’s 13 quarters for every single load, and that doesn’t even count the dryers!
I was going to go with two stars, but I think having an actual live human being present who changed our twenty to two rolls of quarters is a really important thing. It keeps tough people from using the place as a hangout (and this guy could take them, believe me.) I dropped the family teenager off with the clothes and a book, and the clocks on the wall worked, so when she found her phone was dead I could tell her I would be back in an hour, and she could tell what time it is. Little things like that add up.
Now about the dryers. AH HA HA HA HA pardon my hysteria. So the good news is that they are just a quarter. The bad news is that they are permanently stuck on air dry. You could stay all day long, feeding a dryer endless quarters, one after another, and your clothing would not get dry. Keeps the place from becoming a summer sauna, since there is NO HEAT coming from any of the dryers, and for us it was not a problem, cause the dryer at home works just fine. I showed up an hour later; she had chucked all the wet clothes back into our baskets. Out to the car and home to use the dryer.
If you need to use working dryers, you may want to go somewhere else. As for me, I’m ordering a new washer and dryer, FAST.

With a whole bevy of new machines, this place is great!

This place has more machines than the Madrona coin laundry, or the Rainier Laundromat up the street… But that just means it’ll be busier than church on Sunday.
I’d say only about 20% of said machines are NOT out of order. It gets worse…
Last time we went here to do laundry, there was some kind of electrical fire and the fire department busted in, axes in hand. Unfortunately, they left, stating it was a false alarm, and Polar Dry Cleaning (there’s definitely a dry cleaners operation inside here, but I’ve never seen in operating…) and the coin laundry still stand unscathed.
I’d recommend the 23^rd/​Union coin laundry – or maybe even just hand-​washing your clothes at home – over this place, anyday. The workers are rude, they don’t shut the door when they go to the bathroom, they usually don’t turn on the ceiling lights for some reason…
I am totally ashamed that I’ve ever even done my laundry here. I feel unclean in my own clothes, now.