If you’ve been living in the Paton or MacPherson Colleges on MUN’s St. John’s campus, you may have noticed a recent change in how the new laundry system works.
Many student residents believed that the laundry system had been needing a fresh change; from the small size of washing machines typically requiring two cycles, to dryers which leave your clothes still partially damp, and the long maintenance times of frequently-broken machines, the overhaul of on-residence laundry is something that residents of MUN have been fairly vocal about.
And so, the laundry system got an overhaul. However, the way it’s changed isn’t necessarily in the way many residents had imagined.
The laundry payment system changed from the card-swiping system to the smartphone app WASH-Connect, a service owned and operated by Coinamatic Canada Inc, which is MUN Student Residence’s primary laundry service partner.
According to MUN Student Residence, there was a list of different reasons for the change to be made—the primary reason for the change was a part of Memorial University’s contract renewal with Coinamatic Canada Inc: “As part of that [contract] renewal, the previous card-swipe system was replaced with the WASH-Connect platform”.
Another reason for the swap was because of the unreliability of the previous system: “The card-swipe infrastructure relied on aging hardware that was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain and support… Replacing and maintaining the legacy hardware would have represented a significant cost, whereas the new system and associated hardware upgrades were provided through the laundry services contract” says MUN Student Residence.
Being that the laundry system has changed for these reasons, one question still remains on the minds of many students living in residence: “What’s up with the new laundry system?”
The WASH-Connect app does come with a handful of added benefits; automatic laundry timers, broken machine reports, and automated refund requests are certainly helpful, and did not exist prior to the app.
These are certainly some decent quality changes; stream-lined broken-machine reports would be a game changer, plausibly resulting in shorter machine maintenance times, while refund requests may allow for easier refund transactions. The in-app laundry timer is certainly a decent change as well.
However, there are new criticisms of this new laundry payment system too; the requirement of creating a new WASH-Connect account in order to do laundry, along with the introduction of a new 25-cent fee every time the user reloads money onto their accounts “virtual wallet” are among the main criticisms from those living in residence.
This 25-cent “access fee” per cash reload is said to “cover payment infrastructure, device management, and back-office processing” in accordance with the info-blurb sourced directly from the WASH-Connect app.
When asked about the requirement of the 25-cent fee, MUN Student Residence said that “the fee is established by [Coinamatic] as part of the WASH-Connect platform and is not a fee charged by Memorial University”.
However, while the fee isn’t directly charged by MUN, many residents already feel like they’re being squeezed by housing and tuition prices. Critical residents raise the question of why students should have to pay more to use the same, mostly unchanged, laundry system—especially where many students already have to pay so much.
MUN Student Residence did include in their statement that they’re looking to incorporate the card-swiping system in the future: “[we are] exploring opportunities with Coinamatic and the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) to integrate the laundry system with the Campus Card platform in the future to add to the virtual wallet”.
Whether or not such a change would circumvent the 25-cent fee would not be known until any integration is agreed upon and/or finalized.
So, if you’ve been wondering “what’s up with the new laundry system”, hopefully we’ve effectively illustrated what’s changed, what may be to come, and what still may need changing.