With dressy events canceled and offices mostly empty, 'the spigot shut off' for dry cleaners
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 Redi-Quick – 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 like weddings and proms were postponed or canceled, and the service industry came to a halt.
Although dry cleaning businesses were deemed essential and allowed to remain open, there was so little demand that area operations 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."
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The most obvious loss of business may be from office workers, who are now working from home in casual wear — or, just as often, sweats and tees — and don't have a need for shirts, blouses and suits to be cleaned and pressed.
But the economic hit to restaurants and hotels — the hospitality industry — 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, which has 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% cut to his salary. Sneed's sister, who runs the business with him, gave up her pay entirely.
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.
Although business has been slowly creeping upward in the weeks since coronavirus-related restrictions were eased in the city, Wolf's is on track to see its worst year ever.
"When you grow your company to a certain point, you’re like, 'OK, we’re through the woods, we’ll never have to do this again,'" Sneed said. "And then all of a sudden, it’s like starting all over.
"I think it’s going to be a year, maybe even two, before we recapture those sales back."
Business slowly coming back
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.
At the time, much was still unknown about the virus, including how long it could survive on fabric. Marin worried about whether it was safe to come home and hug his children after 10 hour days of handling soiled laundry.
He worried, too, about how to keep himself and his 15 employees safe at work.
"There’s no number I can call and say, 'OK, what can I do now? Someone has come into contact, someone has tested positive,'" he said.
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 Plexiglas at the counter to separate employees and customers, and UV lights at the front of the store, which can help disinfect surfaces and kill airborne virus particles.
"Whatever we need to do, this is what we're going to continue to do," he said. "At least doing these things, we're proactively giving ourselves the peace of mind."
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 and give the business indispensable support.
The long-term question for dry cleaners is whether changes brought on by the pandemic will make a permanent change the way people live and work.
The fear of holding large events, the decrease in travel and tourism, and — more than anything — the increased popularity of working from home could become the new normal.
"If I was a business owner and I was renting office space for 20 grand and I just figured out I don't even need to, why would you make people come back?" Gruichich said.
Scalco said it is important for dry cleaners to consider offering more contact-less pick-up and drop-off options and emphasize services that typically may not be well-known, such as wash/dry/fold services for less formal attire.
Sneed is cautiously optimistic.
"It’ll come back full circle, because even though you’ve got people working from home, people are going to miss that face-to-face contact," he said. "It comes and goes. The new norm that they’re talking about now … I think will stand for a while. However, I just don’t think that it’ll stay like that forever."
Contact Asha Prihar at aprihar@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter @AshaPrihar.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Dry cleaners struggle as coronavirus knocks out need for dressy attire
