This is a long review, however I hope it will prevent you from experiencing what I did at August…read moreCleaners. We've done business with them since relocating here a few years back. My wife and I decided to take a cherished, 35+ year old Petit Point wool and silk decorative pillow cover in for cleaning. It had 3-4 small mice or stink bug stains, which we discovered after a cross country move.
In dropping this off at Augusta, I specifically inquired how the cover would be cleaned. The clerk checked with the owner, who said he would do a gentle soak/wash with a Dawn-type cleaning product (in spite of the pillow cover manufacturer directions of "dry clean only"). In lieu of this and for whatever reason, he elected to use oxygenated bleach. This transformed the pillow from crisp and precision needlework of varying shades of rich and vibrant blues, golds, reds on a creme ground, to the bleached, faded and washed-out mess as shown in my pictures.
At no time did we received a call from the cleaners to inform us of the mishap nor did he flag our article that he should be notified when the customer picked up. I discovered the issue when when picking it up. After paying $10 for it's cleaning, I took the pillow off the hanger to look at it more closely as I thought they had inadvertently hung it inside out; I was dumbfounded the pillow was completely faded/bleached and ruined. I asked the clerk what happened and she simply said "sometimes things fade". It was at this point I requested to see the person responsible for the damage.
From the back, the owner appears, all smiles and acting as if we were old friends. I questioned the state of our pillow, why this occurred and what solution he could offer. This guy quickly began to spin things, becoming argumentative and insulting. Each time I asked or stated something, he would reply with increasingly smart-aleck responses including "had you cared for it as you should have, this wouldn't have happened", "no one will know what it looked like before if you just put it on a sofa with other pillows", "you obviously don't care that much about the pillow since it took you took 10 weeks to pick it up", and other hard to believe remarks. Not once was there an apology, an offer to reimburse me for the cost of the cover (Ebay shows similar ones from $178 to $240+) and I actually had to ask for a refund of my cleaning cost.
I couldn't believe anyone, let alone a business owner, would even consider handling a situation as he did. I decided to stop the dialog and told him I would never do business with him again. He said losing a pillow cover customer wouldn't impact things too much and then asked if I had ever been there before. I replied that he has done all our cleaning and my shirts for a few years and then told him to f**k off and went out the door.
I suspect this little twerp had his clock regularly cleaned throughout his school years and into adulthood due to his desperate void of interpersonal skills, common sense and couth. Be very careful in taking any irreplaceable items to Augusta Cleaners, they are not accountable and certainly do not stand behind their work.
