Clean, Bright and Safe Is a Laundromat Floor, Not a Standard

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My dentist has never once told me the instruments are sterilized. I've been going to that same office for years, and it has never come up, not in the waiting room and not on their website. Why, because the sterilization is simply assumed. Of course it happens, and I'd walk out if it didn't, which is exactly why nobody there would think to mention it. You don't advertise the thing that's supposed to be true by default, the standard.

In our industry, we advertise it. Clean, bright and safe is the phrase, and we say it everywhere, on store websites and in owner/operator posts, in broker listings, distributor guidance and laundromat business plans. We've taken the condition a dentist would say of course we do, it’s mandatory and turned it into the headline.

The benchmark is written right into the sentence

Steve Erlinger has spent 27 years selling laundromat equipment and consulting owner/operators, the last 16 of them at Western State Design, one of the largest coin laundry distributors in the country. In his written guidance for owner/operators, he names clean, bright and safe as the three key words of running a laundromat. Getting there, he writes, puts you "a step ahead of many, many Laundromats."¹

The target is other laundromats, not a standard of quality that exists independent of the room the way a health code or a Michelin inspection does. The comparison is baked in the sentence, and it points down.

It isn't only the distributors using this language. Browse laundromat websites and you'll find similar languaging in their own words. One store I came across describes itself on its homepage as the nicest, newest, cleanest, brightest laundromat in town.² That last part, in town, is the whole tell, the same comparison the distributor drew, now in an owner/operator’s own mouth. The standard traveled downstream to the owner/operator, who shares with their clients.

A better score on the one thing a better score can't win

Terry Hill, who taught manufacturing strategy at the London Business School, gave us the language for what's happening here. He split the things a business competes on into two kinds. Order qualifiers are the characteristics you need just to be considered at all, and order winners are the ones that actually win the sale. On a qualifier, his point is blunt. You only need to be as good as your competitors, and being better at it buys you nothing.³

A spotless floor gets you into the running. A floor more spotless than the store down the block still doesn't win you the client. So the owner/operator who spends well into the hundreds of thousands, sometimes more than $1 million, to be the best in the market at clean, bright and safe is buying a higher score on the one criterion where a higher score returns nothing.

Hill noticed something else, and this is the part that explains why the phrase has sat still so long. Order winners don't stay winners. As a market matures and everyone catches up, the thing that used to win the sale decays into the thing you simply need to show up with. Quality and price did exactly this in manufacturing, winning sales for a while and then quietly becoming the price of entry.³

Clean, bright and safe did the same thing in laundry, and I don't think we noticed it happen. Years ago, when plenty of stores really were dark and grim, being the clean, bright one genuinely won you the block, and that stayed true right up until the market caught up and that advantage decayed into a qualifier. We kept saying the three words as though they still won something. They've been the same three words since I was a kid growing up in this business, and they didn't hold still because they're timeless. They held still because nobody went back to check whether they still meant what they used to.

Why clean, bright, safe, and not a harder one

There's a reason this particular standard is the one that stuck, and it has nothing to do with anyone being lazy. Clean, bright and safe is the only quality claim in this business that a purchase can produce. You can buy it, finish it on a Tuesday, photograph it as a before-and-after, and have a stranger verify it from the sidewalk in seconds.

Every standard that sits above it works the other way. Turn rate, a real labor system, client retention, the way a complaint gets handled when no one is watching, can't be bought, and doesn't photograph. When the highest bar you can clear by writing a check is clean, bright and safe, that becomes the bar the whole industry talks about, because it's the one everyone can point to and prove.

That also explains something about the companies selling to us, without anyone having to draw up a plan. If the standard of a good store is clean, bright and safe, then whoever sells new machines, new lighting, or new flooring is selling the solution to the standard itself. The measure and the merchandise line up on their own, and no one had to arrange it.

Other businesses keeps this off the headline

This is easier to see from outside our own industry. A grocery store doesn't win you over by announcing that the aisles are clean, and a hospital doesn't lead with the fact that it sterilizes its equipment, even though those things matter more in both places than they do in a laundromat. They're understood as the floor, the price of being allowed to operate, which is exactly why these businesses don’t make them the headline.

The restaurant business draws the line most clearly of all, because it runs both halves of this out in the open. Every restaurant in New York City posts a letter grade in the window, and that grade is a health inspection, a permit condition, the floor you clear to keep your doors open. When the city started posting those grades in 2010, a study in the American Journal of Public Health found that the probability of a restaurant scoring in the cleanest range on its initial inspection rose 35% over the three years that followed, compared with the three years before.⁴ The CDC later tied the program to a measurable drop in Salmonella.⁵ The grade works, and restaurants aren’t mass marketing on having an A in the window, because an A is permission to operate rather than an achievement.

The achievement scales sit somewhere else entirely, and they're run by outsiders. Michelin stars and The World's 50 Best anchor at the top, and chefs spend whole careers climbing toward them. Will Guidara's Eleven Madison Park landed on The World's 50 Best in 2010 at number 50, dead last on the list, and his response wasn't to find the restaurant ranked 3,000th and aim to clear it by a hair. He aimed at number 1, and he got there in 2017.⁶ That's the comparison logic that pulls an industry upward. You measure yourself against the top. We measure ourselves against the dark, dated store across town. Why?

An industry that kept moving its bar

Cars show the same thing playing out over time, which is what makes them worth looking at. The government's 5-star crash rating arrived in the 1990s, the insurance industry's safety awards followed about a decade later, and from there an outside body took the measuring stick and kept moving it up, adding side impact, then rollover resistance, then the small-overlap crash test that wrecked a lot of reputations the year it appeared, then headlight performance.⁷

A car that earned 5 stars in 1995 would score badly today, because the standard climbed every few years and the manufacturers had to climb with it. That's what a living standard does. It keeps naming a higher version of good and dragging everyone toward it. Ours hasn't moved in decades, the same three words measured against the same low level.

The bill comes to the owner

The cost of all this lands downstream, on the owner/operator. You spend the money, you get the clean, bright, safe store, and then the standard goes quiet on you, because you've met it and it was never built to point past itself. The store looks finished, so the thinking stops. The motion of the retool gets mistaken for progress, when all it did was clear a bar that was sitting on the floor the whole time.

I'll go first, because I'm not standing on the other side of this. Our own homepage hero says cleaner, better, faster. Another line on the site calls it our clean, comfortable, and recently renovated space. The self-service page lists a clean and comfortable facility as a selling point, and promises that with state-of-the-art machines, a clean environment, and additional amenities, you can enjoy laundry day. I signed off on that website copy. Those three words, or their close cousins, are just what comes out first when you have to describe a laundromat in a sentence. That reflex is the evidence. The standard runs so deep that even someone staring right at the problem reaches for it without thinking.

So it's worth slowing down and asking what I actually say when I describe our store to another owner/operator, because it's almost none of that. I talk about the team greeting clients, helping carry bags to and from cars, about the free bags they hand out without being asked, about hospitality being run as an actual discipline the way a good restaurant runs it. None of that can be bought on a Tuesday, none of it photographs as a before-and-after, and a stranger can't clock it from the sidewalk, which is the whole reason none of it became the industry's standard. The things that would genuinely raise the bar are the things a purchase can't deliver.

The question under the floor

So the questions are there, and I don't think we've really sat with them in industry discussions. Why is there no higher standard in our industry to point at, and why aren't we talking about one, or building one, the way other industries strive toward their top? We tell each other the business is advancing, but a standard that hasn't moved in decades is a strange thing to find at the center of an advancing industry.

And underneath all of it, the one I keep coming back to. A bar set this low, held this long, with no scale built above it. Who does that actually serve?

Thinking about the thinking of laundry:

When you realize you spent six figures or more and the best word for your store is "clean," you bought the bare minimum.

That's all I got for you today.

Waleed

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Echoing the thoughts of James Baldwin.