One Clean Shirt
by Steve Watters on 01/03/2008 at 10:20 AM
To celebrate a good 2007, I decided to have my t-shirts dry cleaned. At least that's what the dry cleaner must have thought. I picked up some shirts from a local dry cleaner yesterday and found a strange item in the mix. In the middle of my dress shirts was an item by itself wrapped in plastic without a collar. I thought at first it might be one of my wife's sweaters that she sometimes adds to the mix. When I looked closer, however, I saw that it was an old t-shirt that somehow ended up in the batch.
Then I looked at the receipt attached to the plastic. The high-end cleaners I've started going to keeps a record of every garment I drop off. Typically I'll see an entry that says something like "blue checked Jos. A. Bank." My t-shirt made it into the system with the description, "White, Solid, fruit loom." I had a good laugh about this until I noticed the charge for cleaning a t-shirt: $3.95 -- twice the cost of cleaning a dress shirt and more than I paid for the t-shirt to begin with. Oh well, at least they took it out of the $20 gift certificate they had sent me.
Have you had any odd customer service experiences like this?
1. tom said the following at 11:05 AM on Jan 3:
I heard one comedian say he never uses the dry cleaners, who might charge $5 to clean a shirt. Instead, he takes them to Good Will, lets them clean the shirts before putting them on the rack, and then buys them back the next day for 75 cents.
I hope he was just joking.
2. Will said the following at 12:45 PM on Jan 3:
What I want to know is did they give the t-shirt extra starch? :D
3. Carrie (the original) said the following at 1:33 PM on Jan 3:
I'm sitting here trying to figure out how this is odd . . . . you gave them shirts to clean and they cleaned them. They charged a little much for a t-shirt, but cleaned it nonetheless.
If you thought it was a little expensive, why didn't you say something?
4. aj said the following at 2:53 PM on Jan 3:
I sent my winter coat for dry cleaning last year and accidentally left my "Dollar Store Special" gloves in the pockets. Well, those nice clean gloves ended up costing me $5! Way more than I paid for them! Ooops... I now always check pockets!
5. Chris said the following at 4:08 PM on Jan 3:
There are still some stores that charge more for women's suits (or at least skirts more than pants). I always get a kick out of the fact that I get my wife a "discount" when I drop off her suits. (This is often since she's a lawyer and is in court a couple times a week.)
Maybe I'm getting some weird cross-dressing discount. They always seem to look at me oddly.
6. Sylvia said the following at 4:26 PM on Jan 3:
Rush Limbaugh sometimes talks about having his T-shirts dry cleaned. He does so(he can afford it) and recommends it to others. He claims that people will come up to him and say "Hey, new shirt?" because dry-cleaning keeps his T-shirts looking just like new. And, if wearing like freshly-creased stright-from-the_GAP looking T-shirts is something people his age think is cool, who am I to judge!