I was reading the super summarized version of capital that Nia Frome wrote on red sails, and this question popped into my head. In the general formulation, capitalists exploit workers who they employ, because they pay them a wage that is not in line with the value that they imbue into their product. When I think about a laundromat, though, there’s not really any employees to be exploited, seemingly. There’s certainly an owner, and they are renting out a service, but they don’t have employees working under them. Is it more akin to like, being a landlord? I was also thinking it has similarities to the Terry Pratchett “boots theory of socioeconomic unfairness” in the sense that if you can’t afford the whole washing machine, or live in a place without one, you end up spending much more on washing clothes in the long run. Anyways, I would love to hear your thoughts comrades :].
Even if there's no labor employed, the owner is doing the same thing as a landlord: Turning an amount of money into capital, then charging a rent on it over time to make a profit. I think something could be said about them turning the labor embedded in the washing machines into profit, since they're only good for some finite number of cycles, but it's secondary to the main part of renting.