[woobar]

These 'machines' were not connected to anything. On your laundry day (yeah, you will spend a whole day doing laundry, and not just loading and unloading a machine), you will pull it in your bathroom. Then connect one hose to the faucet, run another into the bathtub. They were absolute crap. Laundromat is a big step up compared to that.

In fact, building the network of government owned laundromats would be better fit for centrally planned economy of the USSR. My guess the only reason it never happened is the inability to build a reliable heavy duty automatic washing machine.

[tener]

There are things that benefit from the economy of scale (e.g. factories) and then there are those that don't. Laundry is clearly in the second league: all the machines are independent of each other so the whole thing can (and usually is, nowadays) split apart (everyone has a washing machine at their place).