Sold by the pound, done by the piece
That single mismatch is the whole problem. Nobody folds a pound; they fold a shirt, then another shirt, then a sock. So the labour in an order tracks the piece count, and the piece count comes from the customer's bag, not from the scale. Five pieces to the pound and eleven pieces to the pound are the same money and roughly double the work.
Which means the first thing to measure is not a folding rate at all — it is pieces per pound, across a sample of real orders from the routes you actually serve. Everything else on the page multiplies through it.
Rates do not average the way people average them
Take flatwork at 160 pieces an hour and garments at 110 and small items at 220, weight them by their share of the pieces, and you get an answer that is simply wrong. Time is pieces divided by rate, so rates combine through their reciprocals — a harmonic mean, not an arithmetic one. The slow item drags the blend down harder than its share suggests, because the slow item is where the minutes are.
The page adds minutes rather than averaging speeds, which gets it right automatically, and it prints both numbers side by side when the rates differ so you can see the size of the error. It is not a rounding difference; on a mix with a genuinely slow category it runs well into the percentages, always in the flattering direction.
Machine time is not labour
A washer running is not somebody working. The four moments a person touches an order are sorting it in, moving it between machines, folding it and bagging it, and those are what the page counts. Loading the machine time into a labour figure is a common and expensive error: it makes the operation look labour-heavy when it is actually machine-constrained, and it sends people hiring when they should be buying pockets. Whether the machines can keep up is a genuine question and it has its own arithmetic elsewhere.
What break-even means here
It means this order covered what this order consumed: the hands on it, and the water, gas, power and consumables per pound you entered. Rent, the machines, insurance, the van and anybody not touching the goods are all outside it and they are usually the larger half of the business. So read the break-even price as a floor beneath which an order is definitely losing money, never as a price. The gap between that floor and a real price is what the rest of the business lives on.
Questions people ask
How much does wash dry fold cost per pound to produce?
Almost entirely labour, and the labour tracks pieces rather than pounds. Work the pieces from a measured pieces-per-pound figure, split them by item type, divide each by a measured folding rate, and add the sorting, the machine handling and the bagging. The page then divides by the order weight. Utilities and consumables go in as a separate per-pound figure because they scale with weight rather than with piece count.
How many pieces an hour can one person fold?
It depends entirely on what the pieces are, which is why the page asks for three rates rather than one. Flatwork is quick, garments are slower, and pairing socks eats a shift. Every one of those rates should come off a stopwatch against your own pile for ten minutes. A rate taken from anywhere else is somebody else linen, somebody else table height and somebody else standard of folding.
Why is the blended folding rate lower than the average of the three rates?
Because time is pieces divided by rate, so rates combine through their reciprocals rather than by simple averaging. The slow category holds more of the minutes than it holds of the pieces, and it drags the blend down accordingly. The page adds minutes instead of averaging speeds, which handles it correctly, and shows both figures so the size of the error is visible.
Should machine time be counted as labour?
No. A washer running while nobody is standing at it costs machine capacity, not wages, and mixing the two makes an operation look labour-heavy when it is actually short of pockets. Count only the moments somebody has hands on the goods: sorting, loading and unloading, folding, bagging. Whether the machines can keep up with the poundage is a real question and it is a throughput one.
What should I charge per pound?
That is a market question and the page does not answer it. What it gives you is the floor: the price at which this order covers its own labour and consumables. Rent, machines, insurance and everyone not touching the goods sit above that floor and have to be covered by the gap. If your price is below the floor the answer is settled without needing any market information at all.