I charged the wrong price. Twice.

A customer brought in 11.8 pounds of heavy-grease shop towels last week. They got rung in on our budget tier and paid the $27 minimum.

We have a heavy soil rate — $2.85 a pound. At that rate the order is $33.63. So we left about seven dollars on the counter, and I was annoyed about it for a day.

Then I costed the job properly.

Grease rags don't come clean on one cycle. You run them again — twelve minutes. Then you scrub out the drum, because whatever came off them is now sitting where the next customer's sheets are going — fifteen minutes.

That's 27 minutes of rework on a $27 ticket, and nobody paid for a minute of it.

With normal handling, that's 52 minutes of hands on eleven pounds of laundry. The order earned $7.04 per hour of labour. Our worst normal job earns $34.

So — charge the heavy soil rate. That's the fix, right?

I ran it. At the correct rate, that order earns $14.69 an hour. Charging the rate we already had, correctly, on that exact order, doubles it — to less than half of our worst job.

The rate was never the problem. The floor was.

Our heavy soil minimum is 10 pounds. Which is the same floor we use for ordinary clothes — things that go in once, come out clean, and leave nothing behind in the drum. We put that floor on work carrying 27 minutes of rework, and then never looked at it again.

For that ticket to earn what our worst job earns, it needed to be $50.37. Our minimum is $28.50. Low by about 75%.

So go and look at your own upcharges. Not the rate — the floor underneath it. Ours was borrowed from something easier, and no amount of charging the right rate was going to fix it.

One thing we won't price at any number: oil rags, restaurant grease towels, anything combustible. Those get turned away at the door, no exceptions. There's no price that makes a dryer fire a good trade.

Two different lines, and they shouldn't be blurred. If it's just filthy, charge for the work. If it's dangerous, the answer is no.