Many people in Europe don't even have a dryer, so they're often not doing more than one load a day. And really, unless you have a really large family, you probably don't have to do laundry every day anyway.
In Norway they also structure your electricity fees to discourage running multiple appliances at once. --For example, to keep my flat delivery rate as low as possible I have to keep my peak usage under 2KWh. That is, for each day of the month they take the hour when you used the most electricity and average the 3 top values. Yes, it's annoying to think about if I want to wash and dry at the same time, and whether or not I'm going to use the oven or something else while doing laundry.