Women close grocery store in favor of laundry.
By: Leon Tovey
JAMESBURG ¿Usted necesita un lugar lavar sus ropas?
If you do (need a place to wash your clothes, that is), you should stop by Milindo Atlixco Laundry on Buckelew Avenue, in the former site of Tom’s Tackle Shop.
Eustolia Torres and Maria Gcolon opened Milindo April 9 and business has been good but not too good.
"We get not too many people," Ms. Torres said Friday with a laugh. "But it’s good for now, because we’ve been so busy."
Ms. Torres and Ms. Gcolon, sisters from Puebla, Mexico, have indeed been busy in the seven years since they moved to Jamesburg. Shortly after they arrived in the borough, the sisters bought the Eclectic Convenience Store on West Railroad Avenue and turned it into the Hispanic Grocery.
Business was good, but Ms. Gcolon said she and her sister noticed another need in the borough and decided to try and meet it.
"The city has one laundry," she said. "And there are always a lot of customers."
So the sisters decided to sell the Hispanic Grocery (its new owner has plans to relocate the store around the corner, to Willow Street, later this year) and opened up Milindo.
The laundry is open from 7 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. seven days a week. It has 20 washers (some that look big enough to wash a car in), 20 dryers, signs and instructions posted in English and Spanish, and an office out of which the sisters sell half-gallon and gallon containers (forget those skimpy single-load packs) of detergent, bleach and fabric softener.
"Sometimes people have big families, lots of clothes," Ms. Torres explained. "They would spend lots more money on those (smaller packages of detergent)."
Now that they’ve undertaken their second business in the borough, the sisters said they have no immediate plans to look for another niche to fill in the borough’s commercial soul.
"No, no, nothing yet," Ms. Torres said with a laugh. "We have enough for now."