I haven’t had much luck with good service lately; from Comcast to my fraudulent contractor neighbor being a few examples, and something minor happened to me that once again has me rolling my eyes skyward.  I have a lot of long sleeved cotton shirts that are quite time consuming when it comes to ironing them, so I generally tend to send them to the dry cleaners every 2 or 3 rounds of washes or so.  This saves me a LOT of time ironing and since I’m, to be nice, anal, it probably takes me longer than most to be satisfied with an ironing job.

I started using a new place a few months ago and had always thought it odd that, even though they’re a small business, they never gave receipts for the clothes you drop off.  You simply give them your name and phone number.  I’ve never had an issue with them losing any articles of clothing, but I noticed something last week that really angered me.  I had a few of my shirts hanging on the ironing board and noticed some writing on the inside bottom of the shirt on the strip of button holes that is always tucked in.  Sure enough, on all my shirts there, in thin permanent ink, were the letters “KIRK3”.  I then rifled through all my shirts that I send them and this was on every goddamn one of them.

While it’s something one would never see since that part of the dress shirt is tucked in, they must have lost some sort of identification for that day’s batch of clothes and decided to write everyone’s name on each piece.  NOT COOL.  What if someone had included someone else’s shirt in their pile they sent to the cleaners and then that person’s name would be on their clothes?  Whoever did this made a huge lapse in judgment.  This is one time where I simply don’t feel it’s worth confronting them and will just take my business elsewhere.  But it doesn’t give them a free pass to do that.

Even if I complained, what would they do?  Offer me free services?  I don’t want to use them anymore so that would be a useless incentive.  But it does irk me that all my shirts now have permanent marker ink on them, no matter how inconspicuous it is.

I had switched to this particular dry cleaner after another place I had used prior to them had lost a white shirt that I use for my penalty box job.  Not only did they try to stall and ask me for more time to find it (keep in mind we were well past 2 weeks of it missing), they gave me a hard time when I demanded they cut me a check to make up for the lost short.  They finally did and I immediately cashed it just in case they tried to pull a “non sufficient funds” trick on me.

Of course I’m an advocate for small, local businesses but that doesn’t give them a pass on their business and customer service skills and practices.  The bottom line is they defaced several hundred dollars worth of my shirts, even if it’s not visible when worn properly.