Being a man with a business mind and, at the same time being fascinated with the way that other industries operate and all the while being a huge Red Sox fan, I at times found it puzzling why baseball players command such high salaries.  Studying this over the years, I have learned that it is a good investment for ball club owners to pay huge salaries.  Frankly, no one would ever pay a player if there wasn’t a tangible ROI (return on investment).  True, in some markets, ROI is impossible because there are not enough customers.  Still, whatever the salary, an ROI is expected.  It would frustrate me greatly when a player having a banner year asks for a raise, gets it and then performs poorly.  Don’t you think that pay should be performance based?  It will not likely ever be such in professional baseball, but can we make it that way in our shirt laundry?  I think so.  I came up with a strategy that I call “How to give a pay raise that you can take back.”

Shirts are a pain because it takes a while to train a presser. Pressing shirts is more of a specialty than other items. So much so that we sometimes over-pay a shirt presser just because we have found someone that is good and we want to keep them on the staff. If a presser does an inferior press job on a shirt, the touch up necessary may take longer than it took to press the shirt (correctly on incorrectly) in the first place. This is important and contributes heavily to the making shirts a royal pain. Conversely, when an inspector finds a pressing defect on, say, a pair of pants, the touch-up necessary to bring the garment from unacceptable to acceptable often takes mere seconds. A quick pass with the all-steam iron or dancing the pants – still on the hanger – over a puffer and you’re done. Try that with shirts. It will yield poor results.

Hey!  My shirts aren’t getting clean!

Many shirt launderers either say this or should say it.  I am amazed at the varying levels of clean that are accepted as, well acceptable. In fact, some laundries have very clean shirts and accept that as normal while others barely seem to get their shirts clean at all and, yes, they consider that normal.

If you had a wish list, on that list would be I’ll bet, that you could get shirts perfectly clean, with no pre-scrubbing, no ring-around-the-collar and no stains.  You want this first time, every time.