National Clothesline

Whenever a business teeters on the brink of bankruptcy, it’s hard for an owner or manager to keep a proper perspective to set things right. After all, a drowning man who frantically tries to keep his head above water has no time to gather his bearings, find the shore, and swim stroke after stroke toward it. Most of us would rather have a life preserver simply drop from the sky instead of swimming through in turbulent waters. It’s just human nature. Just look at this week’s staggering totals in your state’s lottery jackpot and you’ll see that most of us want a quick, easy fix.

For a cleaners sinking inevitably toward the red (and away from the black), the idea of cutting prices seems like a quick fix. Just offer a fantastic deal — say, one-dollar shirts — and hope bargain hunters drop from the sky and bring their expensive garments in for drycleaning, as well. It’s a risky gamble, to be sure, and cleaners have heard time and time again that it’s not wise to slash prices to revive an ailing plant. Production may increase, but in all likelihood, so will the problems that already plague the store. In many cases, cutting prices only results in losing money more efficiently.

This month, columnist Don Desrosiers warns of the perils of looking for the easy way out. He writes: “Price is what you compete with when you have no other tools to fight with.” In other words, if you can’t differentiate your business from others by your quality and service, your only option is to reel in customers with price. But if you lower prices to lure customers, you cannot raise them back for fear of losing those bargain-conscientious customers. Your business will soon end up lost at sea.

Don’s column (page 42) goes on to point out that shirts are perceived as a pain-in-the-neck, loss-leader item, which, incidentally, is part of the problem. As long as cleaners think it’s acceptable to offer shirts for a ludicrously low price, then customers will believe that’s precisely what they’re worth. That begs the question: if your shirts aren’t worth anything, then why even clean them? Cleaners sell a service, not a product, so the answer lies in raising quality, not lowering prices. To accomplish that takes time and effort — not a quick, easy fix. In the end, however, the extra work will pay off. After all, customers will be willing to pay more for shirts (or other garments) if they perceive that they are getting their money’s worth.

No, it’s not just a figment of our imagination. Although some news reports make it seem otherwise, we are doing a better job of protecting and preserving our environment. Drycleaners have been making progress in this area for years, best witnessed by the dramatic decline in perc consumption and huge improvements in the efficiency of drycleaning machines. The industry has paid no small price for these gains, yet criticism, not credit, is what drycleaners usually get.

But as an industry we are not alone in suffering the slings and arrows of the environmentalist lobby. It runs across the board. In his book, The Progress Paradox, writer Gregg Easterbook comments: “Despite the hysterical tone of environmental reporting in the media, in the United States and Europe all environmental trends, except for greenhouse-gas accumulation, are positive, and in most cases have been positive for decades.”

Examples? Easterbook has plenty. About half of the lakes, rivers and streams that 25 years ago were too polluted to sustain life have come back and are safe for fish and humans. Smog has declined by one-third since 1970, even though the number of cars nearly doubled and the vehicle miles traveled increased 143 percent. Toxic emissions by industry declined 51 percent from 1988 to 2002, while petrochemical manufacturing, the main source of toxic emissions, increased. Half of the Superfund sites have been cleaned up and none of the remaining ones imperil public health. Water consumption in the United States declined 9 percent in the past 15 years even as the population grew. Since enactment of the Endangered Species Act over 20 years ago, at most only one U.S. animal species has become extinct. If public health is deteriorating due to environmental degradation, it’s odd that life expectancy has nearly doubled since the 1920s, Easterbrook notes.

Drycleaners have done their part in this society-wide improvement. We’re not suggesting that we should rest on our laurels, we’d just like acknowledgment that cleaners are doing a good job, not a bad one.