Be aware. They advertise that they provide professional cleaning service for the cheapest rate available at Palo Alto. Yes, the pickups and deliveries are fairly timely and the rate is not expensive for the service available at Palo Alto, but not the others: the sales guy (Michael) is extremely rude (this is important because this is the guy you have to interact with for beyond the scheduled pickup and delivery), and the cleaning service is terrible. In my personal experience, I don't think I got even what I paid for. Therefore, I don't understand all these 14 positive reviews. I asked Astar Cleaners (Palo Alto) to do mostly dry-cleaning of sweaters, pants, shirts, skirts, and kids' clothing, and my impressions are:
- The cleaning service is simply terrible. First, the garments with normal dirtiness were not carefully cleaned. For example, the neck areas of my casual button-down shirts have not been cleaned thoroughly. Isn't this basic treatment? Moreover, they did not remove any stain that came from bike oils, dirts, foodstuff, etc. that I believe can be thoroughly cleaned by some careful cleaning normally offered by family-run cleaning businesses. I have attached pdfs and photos describing the stains that were not removed from the first cleaning, and the same stains (even not faded at all) remaining even after the second cleaning (I asked Astar what to remove in detail with photos and marks).
- The sales guy (Michael) is extremely rude. Here are what happened between him and me Sep-Nov in 2017 in a chronological order.
1. He charged me more: I sent them 27 garments, but he charged me for 34.
2. The delivery guy delivered us 7 garments that are not ours.
3. I told Michael about this, and he replied me in an email saying that "Hello, we have received the rejected 6 shirts and 1 blouse. I am certain these were part of your order, but not to worry at all. I already went ahead and applied 14 AA-Credit to your account..." Strikingly, he did not believe us. He treated us liars.
4. Taking 7 garments out from the original charge, he should have given me back 15 AA-Credit. He is only giving me 14 AA back after taking all the money charged for 34 garments. After a few communications, I ended up receiving 1 AA more. What is really striking and unpleasant was to me that, he obviously expressed his anger against me over the phone. His attitude was really unacceptable.
5. After observing no improvement after an attempt of re-cleaning the stains, I asked him to try once more to tackle those, because I believed that they did not try anything else but running the same process in a cleaning machine again. Michael called me after 10pm on Sunday! Wow. He told me that he can't do the service for me without charging me extra.
6. He says that Astar tried all they could to remove the stains. We will see what happens when I have my garments cleaned using the other services. read more