Overall, I received poor service, my garment was not ready when it was supposed to be, and it was not clean when I did receive it.
On a Saturday afternoon, I dropped off my very dear jacket. As is customary with most drycleaners, I pointed out that I had a stain; I had a bottle of hairspray break open on it. The girl working wrote me a ticket with a pickup time of Tuesday at 4:30pm.
I was unable to make it on Tuesday, so I went in the following day at around 3pm. This time, the owner was working. She was unable to find my jacket, whereupon she asked "did you have a stain"? She said, " WELL. stains need an extra day". This was not explained to me when I dropped my jacket off. I was about to leave for a week long trip and she did, in fact, get an extra day; the jacket was due Tuesday afternoon and it was now Wednesday afternoon. The remaining interaction was full of attitude - she offered to "educate" me on the finer points of picking up drycleaning ("honey, let me educate you here, stains take an extra day") to discussing how she didn't want to fire her employee for giving me the wrong pickup time. When I asked if it would be alright if I picked up the garment after my trip, she couldn't just say yes. She had to say how she's the nicest cleaner in the city compared to "these Asian drycleaners who will throw your things out". For the record, I didn't ever bring up or suggest that she fire her employee; I genuinely don't know how she jumped to that conclusion. I found her attitude incredibly offensive and patronizing on all fronts. Taking some responsibility, a simple apology, and a discount would have sufficed.
After my trip, I went to get it over with (please note that she is a Caucasian lady doing a stereotypical Chinese accent). She explained, "Well, I was speaking with my stain guy and he said 'ooohhhhh....velly baaahhd stain...it esmell elike deh ancient Chinese heerrbal, smell vellly bahhd'. He would know, he's Korean". I was stunned. She also let me know that working on this jacket was some sort of favour from this stain guy. She kept going on and on about how it was a velly bad stain, as if it were some excuse. Lady, it was Aveda hairspray and save your weird, racist commentary please.
The whole interaction felt far too personal for something as simple as picking up drycleaning.
When I went to pay, she offered to just give me the jacket. But then, THEN, she absolutely had to finish with this cherry on my quiet rage sundae: "I sense you are very angry still. I hope you pass on this forgiveness to someone else". WTF???
Though I did get my jacket for free, I would have rather paid for the service than to have such a poor experience. Also, the jacket was still crunchy from the ancient Chinese hairspray. read more