Be honest. When you hand your clothes over the counter at the dry cleaners and they toss it into the bin, you worry, don’t you? You worry about whether they will remember you don’t want them to use starch on your business shirt. And you worry you won’t get all your garments back or that you’ll end up with someone’s hot pink muumuu in lieu of your Chanel blouse.
How does the dry cleaner track your garment through the dry cleaning process, ensuring that you take home the right pieces, and that they’ve all received the individual attention you requested? The answer is tagging – a process that takes place at the counter and ranges from the very simple to the very high tech.
Traditional tagging methods use pre-printed, numbered tags attached to your garment with a safety pin or staple. When you hand over your items, the Client Service Representative (CSR) attaches a master tag to the invoice, and corresponding tags on each individual garment. While effective, these paper tags do little more than identify what garment belongs to which customer invoice.
New methods include uniquely bar-coded paper tags that can be printed on demand at the point of sale, permanently attached bar-coded labels, and Radio Frequency Identification chips. Regardless of the mechanism, these new high-tech tags communicate a lot more than just the owner of the item, they can:
- Identify the customer
- Track the garment through every step of the cleaning process
- Carry customer preferences for that garment – such as starch/no starch, special handling, pressing preferences, and special requests.
Essentially, with new tagging technology, anything that can be typed into the computer can become a permanent note attached to a garment, readable by cleaning technicians during any step of the cleaning process.
At Best Cleaners, we employ permanent bar code technology to track your garments and your special handling requests during the entire time it is with us. This allows us to give you our best service, all while helping you look your best.
