Up until a few years ago, I worked
outside the home. I’d worked at a variety of different jobs ranging from
telephone sales (ugh!) to janitorial to security and I was a paralegal for a
short time. However, most of my working life was spent in customer service. I
delivered pizzas for Domino’s until the night some guy in a pickup truck
decided to make a left turn in front of me without looking. I spent just over a
year at Burger King, first in the kitchen and then at the front taking care of
customers. I enjoyed being at the front taking care of customers most of the
time. Once in a while there would be a rude one, but they were largely in the
minority.
Most of my customer service
experience though, comes from working in a Dry Cleaner/Laundromat. It was while
working there that I learned that the old adage about “the customer is always
right” isn’t true. I worked at two different Dry Cleaners and while there times
when we made mistakes and had to do our best to rectify those mistakes, there
were definitely times when the customer was wrong.
Allow me to explain.
Spots and Stains
As professional cleaners we were
often expected to remove everything a customer has managed to spill, splatter,
or grind into their clothing. If only we could. Unfortunately, even with the
expensive, chemicals available to the industry, it’s not possible for a variety
of reasons. The stain itself may be particularly stubborn and in some cases,
it’s the fabric that holds on to the stain. Rayon, acetate and rayon/acetate
blends in particular are notorious for staining easily or having what I call
“disappearing stains.” That means you spill some liquid, including water on the
garment and it “disappears” till you take it in to have it cleaned and then
it’s there in all its splotchy glory. The worst part is that no matter what a
cleaner does, those kinds of stains will not come out and they end up hanging a
tag on the hangar that tells you that although they’ve done their best, the
stains in your garment are not coming out. Some people think that means they
shouldn’t have to pay because the cleaner failed to get the stain out. Sorry, but you
do have to pay. By the time the cleaner knows the stain won’t come out, they’ve
cleaned the garment at least once and possibly more if they think there’s a
chance it will come out with more cleaning and then the garment is pressed. In other words, they’ve done their job and are
due the price you agreed to pay when you dropped your clothes off.
The best advice anyone can offer
is, if you spill something on yourself, blot it up as best you can and take it
to the cleaners as soon as possible. The stain might not come out, but that
gives you the best chance the cleaner can remove it. Also be sure to tell the
counter person at the cleaners about the stain and what it is. That will help
increase the chance the cleaner will be able to remove it.
Re-doing Clothes
In some cases the cleaner will miss
a stain and the garment comes back to be cleaned again. In that situation the
cleaner will do it again at no charge, but again there is no guarantee the
stain will come out. Believe me, cleaners wish that someone would invent a way
to remove all stains without damaging a garment, but that just isn’t possible.
There are way too many variables.
Buttons
Buttons can be a bit of a sore
point between cleaner and customer. The customer needs to know and remember
that because the cleaner did not produce the garment and therefore did not sew
on the buttons, the cleaner has no way of knowing how the buttons on a garment
will hold up in the cleaning process. I had more than one customer come to me
and fuss about ruined buttons even though in some cases it was obvious that
we’d done what we could to protect the buttons by wrapping them in foil. The
only sure way to protect fancy buttons on a garment is to have the cleaner take
them off and sew them back on for an extra fee, or remove them yourself and sew
them back on later.
Shirt buttons were a constant
problem because of the pressure exerted by the shirt press. The first place I
worked at simply didn’t have the resources to replace them, but the second
cleaners did and I often had to sew buttons on shirts that had lost one or two.
Women’s Shirts
I often got asked why washing and
pressing a woman’s shirt cost more than a man’s. Well, there are two reasons
for that. One, women’s shirts are generally smaller and won’t fit the press,
which is designed for men’s shirts; therefore a presser must do a lot of the
pressing by hand. Two, women’s shirts at that time often had ruffles down the
front or some kind of fancy trim that again, had to be pressed by hand. That’s
more labor intensive and as a result costs more.
Children’s Clothing
This was another thing that people
asked me why it costs more. Well, again children’s clothing is smaller than the
adult clothing for which the presses are designed. As a result, any time you
have to clean your son or daughter’s dry clean only clothing, the garments are
going to require a lot of hand pressing and take more time, which adds to the
cost. I’d also like to remind you that the cleaner cannot guarantee that every
stain your child got on his clothes is going to come out.
Clothes Shrinking in Cleaning
In all the years I worked in dry
cleaning, I only saw one garment shrink. It was an angora sweater and I did not
realize at the time that it needed a short cleaning cycle, with a cooler than
normal drying cycle. Sorry to say that I accidentally shrunk that pretty little
sweater and my boss had to pay for it. Now, having written that, there’s not
another fabric that I know of that shrinks in dry cleaning. As much as we women
hate to admit when we gain weight and can no longer wear our clothes, it’s not the
cleaner’s fault. The dry cleaning process is a liquid chemical process
specifically designed to do the best possible job of cleaning your clothes
without shrinking. I had a few women come to me and complain that we’d shrunk
their clothes, but reality was they had gained weight. All dry cleaners handle
hundreds of garments a day without shrinking anything.
Lost Garments
Unfortunately, this does happen
from time to time, despite a cleaner’s best efforts to ensure that it doesn’t.
I can remember three specific instances of items going missing for one reason
or another.
The first instance was a pair of
linen shorts from a regular customer. I was worried and did my best to find
them. To make matters worse, I had
her fill out a report and she valued them at $100 because they were linen. That really worried me! The
last time she came looking for them, I remembered that we’d had a couple of
garments turn up under “No Name” on our rack and I checked there. Thankfully, I
found her shorts and handed them over. She offered to pay for the cleaning, but
under the circumstances, I didn’t feel right charging her for the cleaning. I
voided the ticket and stapled it to her report.
Another time I had a lady claim
that the laundry she’d brought in for us to do for her brother was missing a
pair of pants. I looked around quite thoroughly, but could not find them. In
this situation she hadn’t brought us his dry cleaning, but rather his regular
laundry, which we never tagged as we washed each customer’s laundry separately.
I also knew her brother lived in a nursing home and at the time nursing homes
were infamous for mixing up people’s clothes and losing things, even when a
relative of the patient did the patient’s laundry instead of the nursing home. I
asked if she’d checked with the nursing home and she said she hadn’t. In fact,
she refused to check with them. I had her fill out a claim form, but as I told
my boss, she couldn’t prove we’d had anything to do with her brother’s pants
until she checked with the nursing home. She never checked with the nursing
home and we never paid the claim.
The last time someone claimed a
missing item, the customer had no receipt and as I told her at the time,
without a receipt to prove the item was here, there was nothing I could do. She
insisted on taking a good look around the shop, which we did, but to no avail.
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