I have these conversations all the time and I’m so amused by them, because everyone has wildly different stories.

For my part, 3 ships, all small boys. In the early 2000s we would put socks, undershirts, and skivvies in laundry bags to be taken to ships laundry, where the Ship’s Servicemen (SHs) would use industrial washers and dryers to do entire berthings worth of laundry at a time. That’s why all uniforms had to be stenciled, they would mostly be thrown in together and then sent back to the right berthing to be divvied out by the compartment cleaners that day.

You could take your chances with your civilian clothes, but for the most part we would go in search of laundromats and cleaning services during port visits.

By the 2010s ships laundry was used mostly for coveralls, and a portion of the space was carved out for individual washers and dryers. I think we had 4 or 5 washers/dryers for the ~280 crew, then a set for the wardroom and a set for the chiefs mess.

We had laundry, but nobody really used it except for the officers. They got their uniforms nicely washed and pressed. Enlisted got their uniforms balled up with the rest of the laundry from their berthing and shoved into an industrial washer. If you were lucky, your stuff was on the outside of the laundry ball; most of the time it barely got wet.

Most people used the self-serve laundry. We had something like 8 or 10 washers you could use on a first-come-first-serve basis. Usually half were broken.

This was on a small boy, early 2000s.