This is part two of a two-part how-to series. You can find part one, How to Be a Bad Customer, here.

Visit the cleaners as often as you need to.

Where I work, both the plant and the store are open on weekdays, and just the store is open for pickups and dropoffs on Saturday. Many of our customers who work during the week bring in the whole week’s cleaning every Saturday and exchange it for roughly the same set of items, clean. This is a good system. It means you’re never picking up or dropping off more than you can comfortably carry, the bill every week is about the same, and you always have enough clean clothes for the next week. Smaller orders also lower the chance of us making a mistake that could get one of your items mislaid or damaged, and bringing something in right after you wear it means any stains are much more likely to come out.

Some of our customers, however, seem to think that we’re actually their spare closet. Twice a year they come to drop off half of their wardrobe and pick up the other half, which usually runs them into the hundreds of dollars. I understand why they do it–I’m a fierce procrastinator myself, and the phenomenon of letting a chore wait long past any reasonable deadline is not foreign to me. But they’re doing both us and themselves a disservice. Sorting out one huge order is a lot more troublesome than doing a lot of small ones, because we’re always interrupted by customers. That gives us a lot of chances to make mistakes. We also tend to be pressed for storage space, particularly at the end of each week, and we resent the customers who blithely take up an unfair share.

Legally, we’re allowed to get rid of clothes that go unclaimed for more than a month. So far we haven’t exercised that right, but . . . I’m just saying. Pick up your stuff.

Know what you’re bringing, but don’t narrate it to me.

Why do I want you to know what you have if you’re not going to tell me? So you don’t get any surprises. I don’t expect you to already understand how each piece needs to be cleaned–that’s my job, not yours–but if you’re paying enough attention to not put a silk blouse in the shirt laundry pile, it can’t get overlooked and laundered. Similarly, if you have something particularly old or delicate, I’m going to ask you about its cleaning history when considering what the safest way to treat it is. If you know or can find out before bringing it, you greatly improve the chance of getting it back both cleaner and in one piece.

At some dry cleaners, the normal protocol is to put things on the counter one by one and have them itemized immediately. At least, so I gather, because people keep doing it. At our place, though, I’m not just going to count how many pairs of pants I see and stick a price on them. I’m going to check the materials and the decorations to make sure they’re safe to clean, count any buttons that need to be protected, and put bright orange stickers near significant stains. If you have more than a few items, I’m also going to divide them by some logical means into at least two smaller orders which are easier to put away and carry.

This is what I mean when I talk about detailing an order. It takes a little while, so we normally don’t detail while the customer is waiting. Instead, we make a quick receipt that just says how many pieces were dropped off and send them on their way. (The exception is when the customer wants to know how much it’s going to cost, e.g. to pay in advance, in which case we do have to detail the order immediately.) So while you’re taking the time to do a simplified piece-by-piece narration, I’m just counting them and waiting for you to finish so I can start going through them properly. I know you’re trying to help, but you’re actually wasting both of our time.

Spell your last name for me if and only if it’s difficult to spell.

We have a customer whom I’ll call Mrs. Baker; her real surname is an English word which is about as common as that one. Whenever she comes in, she says,

“Hi, I’m picking up. My last name is Baker. That’s B . . . A . . . K . . . E . . . R.”

She uses the same voice for this that I use when I’m leaving our phone number on an answering machine: very slow and well-enunciated. By the time she finishes the B I’ve recognized her, pulled up her order on the computer, and started the conveyors, but I don’t interrupt. I wait for her to finish and then pick up the rest of the script.

On the other side of the coin, I had another customer come in one afternoon, and after greeting him I asked for his last name.

“Djedowic,” he said.

I waited expectantly for a couple of seconds, and then asked politely,

“Will you spell that, please?”

He did, I looked him up, and we carried on as usual. The strange thing here was not that he had an unusual name which, at least for a native English speaker, was not intuitive to spell; it’s that he didn’t seem to know that he did. We have plenty of customers with unusual names, or unusual spellings of common names, and they’re so used to having to spell them that they don’t wait for me to ask. I’m curious how he has avoided that.

Why should you care?

You may be wondering why it’s worth your while to be so nice to your dry cleaning clerk. I mean, you only see us once in a while, for a few minutes at most. We don’t do the actual cleaning or make any major decisions, so it’s not like we’re in a position to bother you once you’ve left the store.

Or are we?

Setting aside anything that would do physical harm to your clothes–we’re way too professional for that, even if it didn’t have legal implications–the clerks are the ones who make your bill. There’s a pricing template, of course, but we do frequently have to make judgement calls. Is that fancy dress a “Formal 1,” or “Formal 2″? Does this sweater qualify as “Bulky”? Or, most commonly, are we going to bother charging you extra for rushing your order? Our stated policy is to do so, but it’s only to keep people from asking for a rush every time. For first time customers, regulars who don’t abuse it, and people we like, we’ll commonly waive the rush fee. In most kinds of service, when you pay a little more in the form of a tip, you’ll get more courtesy. At the cleaners, if you give a little more courtesy, you might just pay a little less.