Dry-cleaners nowadays use plain old water instead of petrol, which ruins the clothes. Even the consumer courts will be helpless in resolving the issue
V Raghunathan
Many of us have nostalgic memories of the dry-cleaned clothes that would continue to carry the faint smell of petrol, days after they were cleaned. Today, when we pick up our dubiously dry-cleaned suit and ask the shop attendant, ‘How come there isn’t any trace of that familiar petrol smell?’ They blandly tell you that they have a ‘process’ to remove the smell!
The truth is that in much of the country today, dry-cleaners who use true dry-cleaning solvents like tetrachloroethylene (perchloroethylene), more commonly petrol, are nearly extinct. While I am aware of no formal research data in this regard, anecdotal evidence suggests that most dry-cleaners use good old water for washing our clothes sent for dry-cleaning and merely charge us a fancier price.
The dry-cleaners have it good. Petrol is expensive and so they can charge you a high price. But, because it is expensive, they save a lot when they wash your suit in water instead. And who is going to invest the time and resources to prove that your suit was not really dry-cleaned, given that they no longer wash the clothes in plain sight as in the good old days when you could see clothes churning in a large washing machine filled with petrol right there in the shop? And, in a country of mega scams, who is going to go after a dry-cleaner using water instead of petrol, or sue them in a consumer court? That’s why they don’t even dry-clean the wool they pull over our eyes so blatantly, any more. Having suffered from poor quality of dry-cleaning in Hyderabad for long, I recently sent a woollen suit and a couple of trousers to Bandbox, even though they aren’t located conveniently enough, because, Bandbox has some sort of pedigree in this small-scale unregulated industry of dry-cleaning. Naively, I had hoped for genuine dry-cleaning, considering they charge much higher than others.
When the clothes came back, it was evident that the entire bunch had been washed in water. The relatively new suit was out of shape, the lining was sagging and the woollen trousers appeared strangely shrunk and the crinkly lines on the fabric stood testimony to their encounter with water. Instead of a sheen of good dry-cleaning, the clothes were a sorry looking shrivelled mess. And worse, the inside pocket of the suit was completely torn—acquired no doubt through a snare while swirling inside a washing machine. Apparently, ordinary wash is done the traditional dhobi ghat way, while ‘dry-cleaning’ is given the ‘concession’ of a washing machine!
Expectedly, the shop simply refused to accept any responsibility for the damage and the wet wash. So then, what is my remedy? Who can I complain to about this cheating? Besides, any single episode is of such a low value that it is hardly worth our time to escalate the issue; and escalate with whom? Even consumer courts hardly sound helpful in this context.
Clearly, this is unlikely to be an isolated problem. Nor can one reasonably expect a regulator for the dry-cleaners! The only regulation has to be market driven. Elsewhere in the world, you can pick up a home-dry-cleaning kit (the best known brand being Dryel) in any supermarket. It is a zip-up bag with appropriate chemicals inside into which you pack your clothes and just spin them in the electric dryer. They may not come out as good as proper dry-cleaning. But as there is no proper dry-cleaning in any case, this may be a better alternative yet, that could give some competition to the dry-cleaners at large. Why hasn’t our country come out with such a product?
The author was professor at IIM-Ahmedabad, was president of ING Vysya Bank and has been working in the area of corporate social responsibility. He has written several popular books and is an adjunct professor with Bocconi University, Milan. His website is www.vraghunathan.com.