There’re rejects and… Price, value, costs and…

There’re rejects and…then there’re rejects

So all on-premise laundry rejects are equally bad, right? Well we all know better. That’s because we understand there are those items (especially when no sorting is being done) that are so hopelessly soiled that they either need to go directly to the reject hamper, or maybe even the rag bin!

But aside from those few categories, what’s okay? Normally the acceptable reject rate is about 2%. Get much above that level and you’re making up beds that guests will complain about.

Get close to zero and while there won’t be complaints from the floor staff or guests, operating costs will almost certainly be too high. The singular exception to that rule would be an operation whose soil loads are so low that they’re pretty much washing clean fabrics!

This is where the question of how long that reject pile took to accumulate comes in. Get your hands on that factoid and you can do a back of the envelope calculation to determine the average reject rate. If they process thirty fifty pound loads per day (1,500 pounds per day /10,500 lbs. a week) and that hamper contains 325 pounds, and took a week to accumulate, the reject rate is 3% (325/10,500 = 0309.

If it took two months, it’s 4 tenths of a percent. If that’s the case, we might want to look critically at the level of chemicals being injected. Or perhaps the wash formulas are overdone to allow sub optimal chemical use to be offset, but that choice is wasting both energy and labor.

Next up: Those sometimes lying wall charts.

Price, value, costs and… delivering them

There’s an old, but accurate saying coined by a fellow (today we’d call him an influencer) named John Ruskin. It goes, “It’s unwise to pay too much. But it’s worse to pay too little. Pay too much and you waste a little. Pay too little sometimes you lose everything because the thing you bought doesn’t do what it was bought to do.”

In our soaper world we occasionally see exactly that outcome with the lowball competitor who never delivers the sanitation level his customers paid to receive. It would have been better if they’d overpaid a bit and actually got what they really needed. But too often the desire to save money results in exactly the situation that old John Ruskin opined about so long ago.

Today we’d be well advised to sell quality and at times even tell the prospect that we won’t save them any money on their chemicals. But at the same time our story might be that we’ll save them labor and energy for greater savings … and just maybe give them the sanitation result they paid for and help them increase their business because their customers may just see the difference.