Heartland dry cleaners see increase in business

CAPE GIRARDEAU, Mo. (KFVS) - Nationwide, some dry cleaners are closing their doors because they’re not able to recover after the pandemic slowed business in 2020.

Others are experiencing a business boom as more people return to work and other pre-pandemic functions.

At Patrick’s Cleaners, racks are filling up again after a slow year.

“We didn’t have people going to work. We didn’t have people going to prom. We didn’t have people having weddings. So, we didn’t actually have our core customers for probably six to eight months of 2020,” Owner, Chris Marchi said.

Now, Marchi said those customers are back.

“Numbers of clothes coming in are significantly more, so we’re just trying to process them as good as we can,” he said.

Marchi added staff members to help with the influx of items brought in.

“Our core group is working full-time and we brought in two part-timers to kind of help out, kind of get us caught up,” he said.

Business at his cleaner is doing better than it did in 2019.

“We’re up about 24 percent,” he said.

He said there is one positive that come out of all the downtime during the pandemic.

“If I had to find the silver lining, it gave us time to refine our processes and learn how to do things better,” he said.

“We invested in a new dry-cleaning machine a couple years ago and there were certain things we didn’t know what to do with or how to use it properly, we spent that time to really get to know it and now we’re rockin and rollin with it,” he said.

Marchi has a reminder for those supporting local businesses.

“I think its important for everybody to understand that its hard to get good labor right now, getting people to work for you, the workforce is pretty thin, so to be patient, mistakes are going to happen. People are being trained who have never done things before and also stay local,” he said.

We reached out to some other local cleaners who also say they have seen an increase in business as well.