Before the shop opens, Michael Huang starts every morning with 60 push-ups and sit-ups on the floor of his apartment. He is 78 years old. In about an hour he and his wife Judy will head to San Toy Laundry at 101 7th Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The shop they have owned and operated together for more than 30 years.
Their space has housed a Chinese-owned laundries for more than a century. Michael came from Taiwan in the mid-1970s and Judy came from China around the same time. They met in New York, married, opened the laundry, and have kept it open 5 and 6 days a week ever since. When a New York Times reporter asked Michael in 2016 whether he thought about retiring, he pointed to his head and answered that he'd go crazy up there if he didn't work.
Some how in our industry laundromat ownership, like Michael and Judy Huang, got labeled as, “You just bought a job”.
It has been adopted into our industry vocabulary without asking who put it there and why.
A vocabulary we didn't write
Somewhere over the last 5 or 10 years, our industry absorbed a mindset even more about ownership. Hands-on became the phase you were supposed to grow out of, and absentee became the aspiration to build toward. None of these ideas started in laundry. They arrived from adjacent worlds like real estate investing, franchise sales pitches, and passive-income content, and they settled into how we talk about our own businesses.
The mindset shows up boldly in our own market. Open any laundromat business-for-sale listing on BizQuest and you'll see the same phrases across dozens of postings, describing absentee-friendly operations, semi-absentee arrangements, businesses that operate with minimal owner involvement of 2 to 5 hours per week. That isn't accidental listing copy. It's the frame our industry itself uses to sell the asset.
This mindset also has an economic engine behind it. The passive income category alone is measurable at scale. One count puts the passive income subreddit at nearly 500,000 members, with the #passiveincome hashtag on TikTok clearing 1.2 million posts and billions of views.1 There's a lot of content, coaching, and marketing across small business built on the premise that hands-on ownership is a fallback rather than a design. It's a category of thought that has become profitable, and the profitability keeps it in circulation, and the circulation keeps it in front of us.
That's the machine working behind the phrase.
The 82%
If hands on ownership were the fringe case the framing has suggested, you'd expect it to show up as a small slice of American business. The data says the opposite.
The SBA Office of Advocacy reports that 82.3% of small businesses in the United States, roughly 29.8 million firms, have no employees at all.2 The technical term is "nonemployer firms." What it describes in plain language is a person, or a family, running their own business. That's not a corner of American small business, it’s the shape of it.
The next question is whether these firms are hobbies or actual work. The New York Fed's Small Business Credit Survey gives us that answer. Nearly two-thirds of nonemployer firms, 63%, serve as the primary source of income for their owners.3 For most of these owners, the business isn't a weekend project or a side hustle, it’s what they do for a living.