Dear Reader, A bill went into Congress this month that would drop the overtime threshold from forty hours to thirty-two. We read four articles about it. Not one had a number in it. The closest anybody came was a senator warning that employers could raise prices or cut hiring — which is a forecast, not arithmetic. So we pulled our own payroll and ran it. Before we show you: we're not going to tell you whether this is good policy. That isn't what you come here for, and our opinion doesn't move...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Dear Reader, What you celebrate is what you replicate. I believe that. I've believed it long enough that I say it out loud to people, and I say it mostly to operators like me — one store, one town, no plan to become a chain. We could chase that. We've decided not to. What we're actually trying to do is serve one community with the best of what we've got. And if that's the plan, then the standard is the only thing that has to scale, because nothing else is going to. So this week I went looking...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
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...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Somebody just told me to stop evaluating other laundromats and focus on my own business. I don't evaluate other laundromats. I do my laundry in them. Here's what he didn't know. I've got about 25 pickup and delivery customers in that area where the laundromat I shared is located — that's 60 minutes, one whole hour, from our store in Lake City. If I run that route the "normal" way, I pick up 25 orders, I drive them all the way back to our laundromat, I wash them, I dry them, I fold them, and...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read