Let’s take the pain out of shirts
hirts are a pain
because the equipment necessary to do them is expensive and
specialized. There probably is one singular thing that is more
frustrating than dropping $50,000 or more on a shirt unit and
that is finding out that you can’t do as a good a job as
the “professionals” at the trade show once you get
that shirt unit into your store.
I thought that we were the professionals!
It is indeed aggravating to need to buy a new shirt unit so
that we can make no money on shirts.
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Imagine if each type of garment that you
process needed a separate, specialized piece of equipment to
finish it? What a nightmare that would be! Admittedly,
it’s not the norm, but the smallest drycleaning plants
have one singular press with which every garment is finished
— except shirts.
Gotta sub those out because we don’t
have a shirt unit. Delegating shirts to a third party lends to
the annoyance that they have become. We either have our own
shirt equipment, or we don’t.
Either way, a pain
Either way, the very fact that shirts
require this specialized equipment makes them a pain.
With our own equipment, we either have a
shirt area that takes too much space or takes just a little bit
of space and is jammed into an otherwise useless corner of the
plant.
When it’s the former, we thankfully
never bother to calculate profit by square foot of real estate
used. If we did that, surely depression would set in. If we
shoved our shirt equipment into the corner, we would reason
that while it’s not the ultimate in efficiency, doing
shirts on the premises is better than using a wholesaler.
Hmm. I wonder.
In the drycleaning department, we can make
equipment contributions. We can buy a pair of new all-steam
irons. We can finagle a way to get a new Cindy-Lu in there.
Puff iron has had it? No problem. You can pick one up at the
trade show next weekend. Thinking about tensioning equipment?
You can change over the pants station first, or one pants
station at a time. After you get comfortable with it, you can
complete the change over at your own pace.
All this isn’t true in the
$@#&*% shirt department. No wonder they’re such a
pain!
No small purchases
When it comes to the equipment in the
shirt department, it’s all or nothing. Sure, you can
trash your sleever and body press for a rotary unit and keep
the collar and cuff machine, but it still costs tons of money
to do that. It isn’t the same as buying a puffer for a
few hundred bucks.
Buying shirt equipment is a major
investment and not one that we want to make over and over
again. In fact, more often than not, this investment is delayed
until our back is against the wall.
This leads to shirts being a pain. The
equipment that we have is patched up, bandage over bandage, in
an effort to stall the purchase of replacement equipment.
This leads to sub-par press quality, which
in turn, contributes to shirts being a pain. The shirts
don’t contribute profit, but they surely contribute
problems and aggravation.
Sometimes we replace our equipment with
used equipment. While this is surely not always a bad thing, it
is possible that you are simply trading away the problems that
you’re having with your equipment for the problems that
someone else was having with your “new” stuff. We
loathe still more the thought of replacing that equipment
anytime soon.
All this solidifies the resentment that we
have for shirts and the equipment that they require.
The only way to get around all this is to
be certain that the cost to replace your equipment and the cost
to maintain it are built into the retail price for shirt
service.
This doesn’t mean charging just
enough to cover the mortgage payment. It means charging enough
to cover all of your operating costs — labor, supplies,
utilities and everything else — plus any and all
amortization costs, plus profit.
Add to that some sort of reserve so that
when your equipment needs replacing, it can be done easily and
painlessly.
Start an equipment replacement fund
If your equipment is paid for, you really
need to be escrowing a substantial portion of your revenue for
the inevitable replacement of your equipment.
If this simple statement convinces you
that you need to raise your retail price per shirt, say, 20
cents to save up for new shirt equipment, that’s great,
but you’re only half way there. You must take that 20
cents and let it accumulate so that after doing 2,000 shirts
per week for the next 52 weeks, you’ll have over $20,000
saved up for new equipment.
Don’t spend it on something else! If
you tell your maintenance man and your pressers and your
touch-up person that a new shirt unit is in the relatively near
future, they will feel a whole lot better about the problems
that they may be having with the breakdowns and the press
quality.
You make shirts a real pain when you
charge $1.25 for shirts — because that is what others are
charging — with the genuine hope that this income level
is adequate to cover all of your expenses. It really is a bad
way to arrive at a retail price.
Donald Desrosiers has been in the
shirt laundering business since 1978 and is a work-flow systems
engineer who provides services to shirt launderers through
Tailwind Shirt Systems, 867 Spencer St., Fall River, MA. He can
be reached by phone at (508) 965-3163 or by e-mail at tailwind1@comcast.net and he has a web sites located at: www.tailwindshirts.com and www.dondesrosiers.com
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