A follow-up investigation into the struggles of small laundry businesses
After our story about Brandon Yoon’s grandmother and her Sunny Cleaners went viral—saved from closure by an outpouring of community support—I felt compelled to dig deeper. What I uncovered was far more disturbing than I imagined.
Maybe dry cleaners and laundromats aren’t just struggling because times were tough. A lawsuit says hundreds of businesses like Sunny Cleaners have been systematically undermined for years.
The Lawsuit: Goliath Schemes David?
Buried in court files is a lawsuit that should alarm anyone who’s ever trusted their neighborhood dry cleaner: Life without Laundry vs. Rinse. The allegations are staggering.
According to the lawsuit, Rinse—a huge nationwide corporate laundry pickup and delivery service—engaged in a calculated scheme of deceptive marketing that lasted approximately four years. Here’s how it says the scheme worked:
Rinse had hundreds of pages on its website listing the names of different local and mom-and -pop laundromats and dry cleaners in 13 cities. For you coders out there, all this information can be found on page 11 of the lawsuit.
When customers searched for their favorite laundry service on Google, the results make it appear that these businesses are owned by or connected to Rinse, when they are actually separate companies.
Rinse’s website had individual subpages for hundreds of local laundromats and dry cleaners. Even though most of these businesses didn’t do laundry or dry cleaning for Rinse, when the customers got to the subpage there was a “schedule pickup” button.
The lawsuit alleges that customers clicked the “schedule a pickup” button believing they were arranging service with their mom-and-pop shop. But that button didn’t connect them to their trusted neighborhood cleaner at all. It routed them directly to Rinse’s corporate service instead.
The mom-and-pop shops whose names, locations, and reputations were being used on these subpages? According to the lawsuit, they were rarely—if ever—actually fulfilling those orders. And most likely never even knew customers were being diverted away from them in the first place.
The Scope Is Heartbreaking
The lawsuit alleges that hundreds of laundromats and dry cleaners across 13 cities had their identities co-opted this way. Four years of lost customers. Four years of diverted revenue. Four years during which small business owners like Brandon’s grandmother may have wondered why loyal customers stopped coming back.
When you look at who owns the laundromats and dry cleaners pictured in the lawsuit, a pattern emerges that’s impossible to ignore: a significant number of the affected businesses have Asian owners. Express Laundromat (owned by Wuke Weng), Back Bay Laundromat (owned by Kwang Kim), and Andrew Place (owned by Tony Nguuye). Family businesses built by immigrants who came to America believing in the promise of honest work and fair competition.
More Than Business—It’s Personal
As the son of a Chinese American immigrant, my father built his life in the t-shirt business, this hits close to home. I’ve watched my father work grueling hours, building something from nothing. These aren’t just businesses—they’re legacies.
The alleged deception by Rinse wasn’t just stealing revenue. It was stealing trust. Customers thought they were supporting businesses like Dependable Cleaners, Laundromax, or Tiny Bubbles] down the street, the woman who remembered how they liked their collars starched. Instead, their loyalty was being redirected to a corporate service that could outspend, outmarket, and apparently—if these allegations are true—outmaneuver the very people who built this industry.
A Wound Still Healing
What makes this even more painful is the timing. These businesses were allegedly being undermined while simultaneously struggling to survive COVID-19. When the pandemic forced closures and devastated foot traffic, many of these family-owned cleaners were fighting for their lives. And according to this lawsuit, some of them may not have even known they were also fighting against a company using their own name and reputation against them.
Why This Matters to All of Us
This isn’t just an Asian issue—though the community has clearly been hit hard. This is about every mom-and-pop business trying to compete in an economy increasingly dominated by venture-backed corporations with unlimited resources and, apparently, questionable ethics.
The lawsuit states that Rinse has since stopped this practice. But the damage to these hundreds of businesses? That can’t be undone with the flip of a switch.
I wonder if Rinse will come clean about this and make it up to all those affected?
