I have a large carpet that I bought in Istanbul in the 90s. It hasn’t been cleaned in a long time. I called the local place that specialized in expensive rugs and they told me that they could pick it up on Friday and they would have it back to me in a month.
A month? I can see how they would be backed up and not be able to get to it for a month so why not pick it up in 3.5 weeks and get it back to me a few days later? They had closed when the question occurred to me so I will call and ask tomorrow but maybe one of you knows what I am missing.
I thought maybe they thought that it was so filthy that I didn’t want it in the house but I did mention that it was a routine cleaning.
Don’t they air-dry such rugs? I mean, maybe they run them through some rollers to squeeze most of the water out, but then they hang it up to dry, I think. Depending on the rug, that might take more than a few days. Total WAG on my part. We had an area rug cleaned and repaired once, but I have no memory of how long it took.
Drying is an issue, i would expect that to be a week at least. I would also expect a day of gentle soaking - maybe one each for wetting, soaping, and rinsing.
But no matter how i build it up, i can’t make it be a month. Maybe they share facilities and lease them out when they accumulate a large enough batch?
They might be operating more slowly due to personnel taking vacation at this time of year (summer).
In the services industry, “Overpromise and overdeliver” is a commonly used strategy. In other words, it should take two weeks, but they’d rather give their customers a nice surprise than an annoying disappoint.
Leaving good faith aside, though, the cynic in me has to snicker at this:
[quote=“hajario, post:1, topic:987234, full:true”]
A month? I can see how they would be backed up and not be able to get to it for a month so why not pick it up in 3.5 weeks and get it back to me a few days later? [/quote]
Some possibilities:
So you don’t change your mind and hire somebody else who offers you a lower price of faster delivery.
Having extra rugs waiting is helpful in case others finish early and they have time to start on the next one available.
Other rugs of similar materials might be done faster together at the same time, so they try to accumulate a group of similar rugs to do as a batch.
Is it possible they don’t do the cleaning in-house, but ship it somewhere? Add most of a work-week for ground shipping each direction, and it gets a little more possible.
We had a similar quote for run cleaning, I think ours was 3 weeks. I just assume it takes time to it right - you want a deep clean without doing damage to the rug.
Assuming it’s a 2 week process estimating less than a month just sets them up to disappoint you if they can’t get started right away and it take a little long. You could go around to each carpet cleaner and tell them how much time the last cleaner estimated and eventually one of them will tell you it can be ready in a day or two. Do you want to use that one?
I have my lawn tractor serviced every other year, and they pick it up and return it in a month. Obviously it doesn’t take anywhere near a month to service my lawn tractor. I assume their delivery person only does pickups and deliveries once a week so he comes to get my tractor, it sits in an inbound queue for a couple weeks, they work on it, put it in the outbound queue and it eventually comes back to me when they’re running deliveries again.
They might only have the capacity to pickup and deliver so many rugs at a time (more at a time than tractors of course), and need to coordinate pickups with deliveries to make the most of their driver’s time, so I’m thinking they’ll pick it up, it’ll sit in a queue, take 2 weeks to wash and dry, and will be in the next delivery spot that comes by your neighborhood.
Good suggestions so far. This is a company in my smallish town that’s like five miles away from me. They pretty much only service Santa Barbara and I see their trucks around all the time. They have been in town for over 100 years and everything is done on site.