Under communism, how do we clean our clothes?
- It's not really efficient for every housing unit to have its own washing machine let alone dryer
- some people can dry clothes on lines but some can't
- Washing clothes by hand sucks
- Laundromats suck
- Industrialized clothes washing? I have no direct experience with this
And it needs so much water.
To my mind laundry is one of the most intractable issues.
For rich people sure. But for normal people?
There's variety within any profession like this, at many points in history it hasn't been the norm for normal people in urban settings to cook their own food or have cooking facilities at home, instead they purchased food from people whos job it was to cook.
But there would still be a difference between a business serving everyday people and personal chefs/cooking staff.
Meat was also for rich people 500 years ago, but the wonders of industrialization led to many previously unattainable goods to become widespread.
Such a nonsense take, chickens and cattle were very widespread, as well as fishing. Inuit famously had a diet of almost entirely meat, though of course it wasn't healthy and there were many vitamin issues.
This definitely varies from culture to culture, but being Spanish, I can tell you that meat was more often than not a cause for celebration, to the point that the pig slaughter was a community event that took place in the main square of the village. Data for meat consumption over time in the former Russian Empire and the USSR also suggests that meat wasn't a thing people used to have often, and whose access increased with industrialization.
Yeah, pretty normal people. Doing laundry by hand is really labor intensive and you have to have fuel to heat water. It was worth it for relatively poor urban people to have someone do their laundry for them in many times and places. Like economically having one person heat a whole bunch of water at once just made more sense. If you did it at home you'd have to do laundry plus all your other daily tasks.
During the colonization of the American West, who did your laundry mostly depended on your marital status. Since laundry was "women's work", bachelors wouldn't do it. But there weren't a lot of women around during the early era of colonization, so you got Chinese immigrants (largely from Hong Kong) who would establish these commercial laundries to cater to all the single men who couldn't or wouldn't do their own laundry (it was also very time-consuming and arduous work). American racism against Chinese immigrants who held these jobs led to things like the avowedly leftist Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance, which was a labor organization that fought to keep these jobs legal.