DeKALB | Evolution is not a concept limited only to animals. In today’s economic climate, businesses are forced to grow or be sucked under.

How does a business remain afloat these days?

In the case of some DeKalb area services, all that needs to be done is add tanning beds.
Laundry Lounge, 818 W. Lincoln Highway Unit 1, is one of these establishments that has found a way to compete with the economy.

Owner Dave Melms has included tanning in addition to the laundromat for seven of the store’s 17 years of business.

He said he noticed tanning becoming popular among college students, so he filled up the extra space in his store with tanning beds.

Despite the two services being in the same building, Melms said his clientele remains fairly divided.

“Generally, I have my tanning customers and I have my laundry customers, and I also have some of them that use both facilities,” Melms said.

It would seem that the idea of adding tanning services to something like a laundromat would be a rare occurrence, but one only has to look up the street to prove otherwise.

Like Laundry Lounge, Dollar Video, 1127 W. Lincoln Highway, also offers tanning services.

Owner Rob Molina said he and co-founder Nick Patel started the store in 2001.

Once they realized that their video business was not doing as well as they hoped, Molina and Patel came up with the idea of putting in tanning beds. So far, the combination seems to have had a different kind of success than Melms has had at Laundry Lounge.

“It is one of the weirdest concepts, but it works,” Molina said about his unusual business hybrid. “People come in and they will rent a movie and then they come over and start trying out tanning, and the tanning people will come in and they will grab a movie.”

In the cases of these two local proprietors, their businesses have involved bringing together two very different ideas into one storefront.

Some might argue that this kind of wild thinking is the only way to secure customers. Melms seems to be the kind of person who would support that theory.

“As the markets change, you have got to either adapt or close,” he said.

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