The Story of Ninty Profits

The Story of Ninty Profits
by dkhodz

Once there lived a wee Irish laundromat owner named Ninty Profits. Ninty enjoyed cheese and chatting with his customers.

One day a large chain laundromat moved into Ninty's town. Ninty said "my customers are loyal, I don't need to change very much in my store to keep my customers."

However, the customers began using the large laundromat as well as Ninty's older, smaller, less-capable laundromat. Eventually almost everyone in town went to the larger competitor. Ninty Profits began to get lonely and finally took out a huge (for him) loan to refurbish the store. He invented a way to use smaller washers and dryers instead of the standard size. He painted his laundromat a bright blue color... actually he changed colors often and they were very bright. But the bright colors only attracted little kids like Timmy O'Toole and Timmy McCormick.

The Timmies loved Ninty Profit's bright store, but when they were older they began to use the large chain just like the rest of the town.

Ninty's competitor, meanwhile, had started treating their customers poorly. They had added no new features to their laundromat, except making it a little smaller and painting it black. The machines went a little faster than before, but the price was higher to compensate.

Ninty was so lonely, he was forced to consider completely restructuring his laundromat's hardware and design. He labored long into the night, keeping his customer's thoughts in the forefront of his mind as he went back to a standard, full-size load on his washers and dryers. He abandoned the wild colors at his store (at least for now) and chose a respectable modern color. Most of all, he labored at creating a pleasing experience for every customer that came to his store. When he was finished, he noticed what his competitor had been doing at the same time.

The large competitor had built an enormous monolithic laundromat/paper supply store/screen printing shop/petting zoo/oil change shop 20 miles outside of town. They began charging 5 times what they were charging before and began to stop fixing the machines in their old building, letting the building slowly deteriorate and fade into memory. The large competitor had a few customers, yeah. But they were all jerks and snobs. Just to get in and do their laundry, you had to pay for the petting zoo and walk through it first. Customers began coming back to Ninty Profit's small laundromat again. Even some new customers who had never been there before. And Ninty wasn't lonely ever again.

The end.

Epilogue: some accounts say that a third laundromat came into town shortly after the second one, but no one that ever visited the third laundromat ever went back to one of the other two.