Plenty of people live in apartments that don't necessarily have laundry on site. I don't have any firsthand experience, but I'd imagine it'd be a lot more convenient to be able to do your laundry at work for free vs. having to take a separate trip to a laundromat, feed quarters to the machines, etc.
I think this is key. I have a laundry machine at home, and would honestly be ashamed to bring in my wash, but if it saved me a trek to the laundromat, and the google laundry facility was a few minutes walk from my desk, it might give me a nice break from my day to mindlessly fold clothes.
People that work at Google live in apartments that have laundry onsite.
Because when they saw to it that the people who previously lived in that apartment were pushed out by rent increases, they also demanded that the landlord put in laundry machines.
That way, they could do their laundry at work and have the satisfaction of checking off "on-site laundry" in their mental status meters.
