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November 14, 2012
Obamacare: What Healthcare Reform Means to Your Dry Cleaning Business

NEW YORK CITY — Will premiums go down? Will it be easier to shop for insurance? Will available policies offer better coverage?

NEW YORK CITY — It’s the nation’s most comprehensive health insurance reform since Medicare. And it’s been endorsed as constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Now, how will the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) affect your dry cleaning business? Will your premiums go down? Will it be easier to shop for insurance? Will the available policies offer better coverage? And will you be protected from those profit-busting price hikes that so often occur when one employee in a small group gets seriously ill?

We’ll answer your most important questions at the end of this article. Here’s one thing to get out of the way first, though: No employer will be required to provide health insurance. However, some employers, as you will see, will pay penalties if they do not provide insurance and their employees decide to buy insurance from the new statewide insurance pools.

April 19, 2012
Second Amendment and the Workplace

DOLTON, Ill. — Workplace violence policy can protect employees and employer

DOLTON, Ill. — Property rights and gun rights are in an intensifying conflict over whether employers can prohibit employees from having guns on company property, according to a recent National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) magazine article. The conundrum is what business owners should do, regardless of which side of the fence they sit upon concerning firearms.

Having a workplace violence policy can protect employers against legal action. You and your business must have written proof that you’ve taken steps to keep employees safe. I’m not a legal expert but I do watch out for firearms legislation that may affect me now or in the future; I do not want my firearms banned or confiscated because of some technical infraction.

January 19, 2012
Right to Represent

LOS ANGELES — Those who know I spent 25 years in show business often ask why I’d ever leave show business for dry cleaning. And they get one of three answers.

Some I tell that I’ve been to the Cannes Film Festival, to Sundance, to the Toronto, London and Telluride Film Festivals, and the nicest people I’ve met were at the Long Beach dry cleaners convention.

And that’s true: in Sundance, everyone looks both ways before saying hello; they don’t want to engage you and miss Harvey Weinstein or George Clooney coming their way. But dry cleaners have spent 12 hours a day for years being nice to the customers who walk in their stores and, as a result, they’ve just become nicer.

Others I tell that I wanted to represent a product instead of a person, especially after having clients who wanted me to complain to the studio and network of the series they were starring in that they wanted DirecTV, not Dish TV, wired into their dressing room. No matter how successful our business gets, I doubt one will ever demand premium cable channels.

January 13, 2011
Plant Design: Merit Awards, Part 1

CHICAGO — The Merit Awards in the 50th Annual Plant Design Awards went to six drycleaners from every corner of the country. Part one of this story details three of the winners: Dubin Cleaners, Encore Cleaners and Image Cleaners.

Dubin Cleaners & Laundry, Farmington Hills, Mich.
Dubin Cleaners’ new plant anchors a strip mall and offers customers a “unique” cleaning experience, third-generation operators Andy and Sandy Dubin say.
   

June 8, 2010
Survey: Most Operators Taking Typical Summer Vacations

CHICAGO — Almost two-thirds (64.3%) of operators are making summer travel plans comparable to last year’s, according to the most recent Wire survey. One in five (21.4%) say they will take more leisure time than they did last year, and just 14.3% say they will scale back their vacation plans this year.

May 10, 2010
Contamination Case Against Drycleaning Equipment Manufacturer Dismissed

DETROIT – The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California recently dismissed an environmental contamination case against Hoyt Corp., a drycleaning equipment manufacturer formerly based in Wesport, Mass. The plaintiff, Hinds Investments LP, claimed Hoyt Corp. was responsible for perchloroethylene contamination on its property and was seeking damages for environmental remediation costs.

February 2, 2010
Illinois Task Force Urges Water Conservation for Chicago Area

CHICAGO — The Regional Water Supply Planning Group, a task force funded by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources to study the Chicago area’s long-term water needs, has issued hundreds of recommendations for businesses and residents to start conserving water to prevent future shortages.

August 17, 2009
Drycleaning Employee Fired over Pregnancy, EEOC Says

MINNEAPOLIS — The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has filed a lawsuit against White Way Cleaners of St. Paul, Minn., accusing the drycleaner of firing an employee because she was pregnant.

May 6, 2009
Weighing the Costs of Clean

To travel or not to travel — that is the question. To visit and investigate the latest equipment or not; that is the question. To buy or not to buy; that is the question.

Operators ask themselves these questions every time a Clean Show approaches. For some, there’s no doubt whether or not they can attend this year — they can’t; the economy is just too weak right now, and their plants are only eking by.

April 24, 2009
Timeline: 1990s & 2000s

1990s

The hallmark of the ’90s is a barrage of increasingly stringent rules and regulations covering drycleaning operations and the use of perc, past and present. The industry must constantly protect its interests against the regulators, while simultaneously developing new processes and strategies to secure its viability into the future.

January 21, 2008
Drycleaner’s Killer Sentenced to Life

NEW YORK, N.Y. — Denworth Davidson, the triggerman convicted in the murder of Red Cap Valet operator Bruce Levy, was sentenced to life without parole last week in a Queens court.

“A lot of people’s lives were destroyed here,” Queens Supreme Court Justice Robert Hanophy told Davidson in issuing the maximum sentence.

October 3, 2007
Drycleaners' Killer to Challenge Lethal Injection

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Two inmates on Kentucky’s death row — one convicted of the slayings of two drycleaners in 1990 — will soon test the constitutionality of execution by lethal injection before the Supreme Court. The state’s lethal-injection procedures amount to cruel and unusual punishment, according to the inmates.

October 3, 2007
EPA Adds Utah Site to Priority List

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced it has added the Five Points plume in Woods Cross City, Utah, to its National Priorities List (NPL) of Superfund sites. The plume of perchloroethylene contamination is thought to have come from a drycleaning plant once located at a nearby strip mall.

June 25, 2007
Organized Cleaning?

EVANSTON, Ill. — Legislation is now being introduced to change the rules by which unions can organize private employers — including those in the commercial laundry and drycleaning industries. The bill was scheduled for a vote on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives at the beginning of the month.