Almost every place I have seen a janitor or cleaning crew using a mop, the water in the bucket has so much dirt in it resembles crude oil. Yet they never just get some clean water, day after day using that crude oil seems like it is just putting idrt back on the floor!
I asked a janitor at a place I worked once if there was soap or something and he said it was just water, but he was not supposed to change it.
It’s their way of embracing the essence of their work.
ETA: kids, this is why you don’t post high.
The answer is that changing the water frequently is a lot of work, and also wasteful of detergent or whatever cleaning product maybe added to the water (and of energy, if they are using hot water).
Could the floor be got cleaner with more frequent water changes? Yes. Would it be worth it? Who can say. Worth it to whom?
They’re not paid to keep the floors clean. They’re paid to drag a wet mop across the floors regularly.
Some twenty years ago, my landlady exploded when her son-in-law did change the water in her bucket. She said the water was still good to use (“pretty nice slops,” she called it) and accused him of wasting expensive detergent. That woman was beyond rich and a terrible miser.
More often then not it’s because they’re lazy. My employees are never happy when I tell them to change the mop water when it’s filthy. It means one extra time they have to flip over a heavy mop bucket and hope it doesn’t end up all over their shoes, one extra time they have to stand there for five minutes filling it up etc…
Most of them don’t care that I can come in the next morning and look at the floor and see the crappy job they did. There’s plenty of times when I can see they literally just took the mop and dragged dirty mop water from one end all the way to the other end of the store without even picking it up. (As in I’ll just see a straight line of dirt all the way across).
Some have some pride in their work, some just know that they have to get the floor wet before they can punch out and go home. Most are somewhere in between.
The problem is that everyone notices a filthy floor but no one notices a clean floor. So if it’s dirty they get yelled at, if it’s friggen immaculate no one says anything. The trick is to get it just barely clean enough that they don’t get in trouble. But then the grime builds up and it gets hard to clean and at someone point someone ends up on their hands and knees scrubbing it.
Next time you’re in a Target, look at their floors. It’s no accident how clean they are.
True.
But to be fair, Target doesn’t have a kid with a mop, they have a man with a machine.
They have a machine, plus they have probably have a company that comes in and strips the wax off the floor, puts down 3 coats and burnishes it at least quarterly, maybe even monthly. That probably costs, if I had to guess, maybe $100,000 per year, per store. Without a good coat of wax on the tiles, it’s a lot more work to keep it clean.
Also, those machines are nice, but they don’t do corners, they don’t get into bathrooms, they don’t get under some of the places where the shelves overhang too far, they don’t get too close to displays that can get knocked over etc… And as I heard from someone that does this professionally (I know people in the cleaning business). Get the corners and edges taken care of and the rest will look great. When a floor looks filthy it’s usually because they’re not cleaning those hard to reach parts.
It doesn’t take long for the water to look dirty. If tasked with mopping an aisle in a heavily trafficed retail store you only need to go about 8 feet before the water is opaque. Depending on where the sink is how many times are they supposed to go back and forth?
At Safeway we had Vladimir. He spoke not a word of English and for years we didn’t know his name so we just gave him one; I believe we picked “Eugene” for some reason. But he gave us all bottles of Stoli every Christmas, so he was alright with me!
Haha! We had Konstantin (his nametag said Constantine though) at the local grocery store I worked in high school. He spoke a mishmash of English and Russian. Awesome guy.
Most likely, you’re underestimating how fast the water gets dirty and overestimating how dirty the water really is. When I was a janitor as a kid, my mop bucket would look cloudy as soon as I stuck a clean mop in it. After doing about 15 sq ft, it looked as you describe. No way I’m changing it every 30 seconds.
One thing that irked me when I worked fast food in the past was how grungy the edges and corners always were, and the near-impossibility of cleaning them by any measure short of getting on your hands and knees with a scrub brush. If it were up to me to set code, all restaurant kitchen floors would require rounded corner and edge tiles
What gets me isn’t the opacity of the water, but the lingering reek of mildew when they use a mop too many times. Yuck!
Hell, when I worked as a janitor/busboy in high school, the damn soap would make the water cloudy before I even mopped the floor.
The trick was to fill the mop bucket VERY full and use the correct amount of soap as described on the package. Too much, and you actually attract dirt for the next mopping, and too little, and you don’t get it up well. Plus, more water = more volume to dilute dirt into.
Most co-worker knuckleheads would use about 1 gallon of water and a shitload of soap, and it was no good- it not only didn’t clear the floors worth shit, it made the next day’s mopping dirtier because the excess soap attracted dirt.
even mud will pick up dry dirt.
I have seen mop buckets that are double buckets – one is filled with hot water & detergent, the other with cold rinse water. The janitor uses the mop from the hot bucket, mops the floor, then dunks it in the cold bucket to rinse off the dirt he’s picked up. Then he wrings it out, dunks it in the hot soapy bucket, and starts on the next section of floor.
That definitely gets the floor cleqner, and the hot soapy bucket lasts much longer. But it takes more time to mop that way, and most places don’t care that much – they have assigned the janitor too much to do for him to spend this much time getting a really clean floor.
Back when mopping the floor was pretty much my job description I would mop the floor, change the water, and then mop it again. Doesn’t everyone do this?
That mop hadn’t been put away clean.
Bold mine, if no detergent is used, or something added to break the surface tension of the water, perhaps dirty water will sometimes clean better then clean water. And clean water may be harder to work with.
IDK 
