Business coming back slowly for dry cleaners
Work-from-home trend, cancellations cut sales
MILWAUKEE – Several weeks into the coronavirus pandemic, a regular customer walked into Redi-Quick Dry Cleaners in West Allis, Wisconsin, with five winter jackets. The order was one of very few that Linda Gruichich and her husband, Sam – the owners of RediQuick – had seen since Wisconsin shut down in March.
Gruichich could smell the detergent on them. The customer was just trying to give the couple some business.
“We knew they didn’t need to be cleaned. But they were trying,” Linda Gruichich said.
For the Gruichiches and others in the dry cleaning industry, business has dropped off a cliff as offices shifted to work-from-home models, formal events such as weddings and proms were postponed or canceled, and the service industry came to a halt.
Although dry cleaners were deemed essential and allowed to remain open, there was so little demand that businesses slashed their hours or closed their doors for weeks at a time. Gruichich and her husband had to temporarily lay off their only two employees. When customers did bring in items to be cleaned here and there, she often wrote them handwritten thank-you notes.
“It’s great to be called essential,” Gruichich said. “But it didn’t matter because you just had no business.”
The most obvious loss of business may be from office workers, who are now working from home in casual wear and don’t need shirts, blouses and suits to be cleaned and pressed.
But the economic hit to restaurants and hotels compounded the impact, said Todd Sneed, co-owner of Wolf’s Dry Cleaners and Laundry.
“Literally, the third week in March, it was like ... the spigot shut off,” Sneed said.
Wolf ’s, with several operations in the area, has contracts with more than 100 hotels in Milwaukee and Waukesha.
According to Sneed, the 60 to 75 orders per day that his business typically saw declined to about two per week.
Overall, weekly sales dwindled to between 25% and 40% of what they had been.
Wolf ’s has cut down on operating hours, and Sneed said he took a 60% pay cut. Sneed’s sister, who runs the business with him, gave up her pay.
They turned to their own money to keep it going, and – like other dry cleaners who spoke with the Journal Sentinel – tapped the federal government for a Paycheck Protection Program loan to help pay their employees.
Before the pandemic, the year had looked promising, with many events and gatherings tied to the Democratic National Convention and the Ryder Cup. But the DNC has been scaled back drastically, and questions remain about the Ryder Cup, still scheduled for September on the Straits Course at Whistling Straits in Kohler.
Nationwide, many dry cleaners lost around 90% of their regular business at the height of the shutdown, according to Mary Scalco, CEO of the Drycleaning and Laundry Institute, an international trade association that counts more than 10,000 U.S retail operations as members.
Those that offered pickup and delivery service tended to do a little better, experiencing losses of 60-70% of what they had made in previous years.
Now that much of the country has reopened, cleaners are starting to see around 50% of the business they’d see around this time in a typical year, Scalco said.
Oscar Marin, owner of Prestige Dry Cleaners in Milwaukee, shut down his store entirely for more than two months toward the end of March, when he saw sales dropping to just 10% of what they had been.
Marin closed Prestige’s doors from March 21 to May 25.
Now that he has reopened, Marin is taking precautions. In addition to wearing masks, disinfecting surfaces and washing hands often, Marin installed plexiglass to separate employees and customers, and UV lights at the front of the store, which can help disinfect surfaces and kill airborne virus particles.
Business “isn’t back to normal by any means,” Marin said, and the staff is still operating on a reduced schedule. Still, Prestige’s regular customers continue to show up.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel USA TODAY NETWORK