If you’re a business owner on the brink of the decision between purchasing and laundering your own linens or hiring a local linen company, this blog is for you! While some reasons for utilizing a commercial laundry service are more obvious, here we highlight some of the lesser-known pitfalls of DIYing your business’ laundry.

Big Initial Investment and Ongoing Expense

Depending on the size of your operation and the extent to which you utilize linens in your day-to-day business, you can spend tens of thousands of dollars up front to purchase all the inventory you will need. The expense doesn’t stop at the initial investment, however. Despite your best efforts, linens get lost, damaged, faded, or permanently stained, and you have to continuously replace portions of your inventory to keep everything looking its best.

Eats Up Space in Your Facility

Speaking of all that inventory – you need a place to store and care for it. Whether you own or operate a restaurant, hotel, medical facility, or spa, you know that the more people you can fit into your establishment at once, the better for your bottom line. Choosing to launder your own linens eats up valuable square footage in your facility – perhaps more than you would think. Not only do you need to have space set aside for large, commercial grade laundry machinery, but you also must have the space to fold, iron, and store your inventory. For more tips and tricks to maximize space in your commercial kitchen, check out this article on The Components of Kitchen Layouts.

Requires Specialized Staff Around the Clock

So now you’ve purchased all your linens and allocated space in your establishment for all the equipment you are going to need, so you’re all set, right? Nope. If you do your own laundry at home, you know it’s a never-ending job (especially if you have a family). The same is true for businesses. Laundering your own linens means hiring staff to do it who are trained on the equipment, know how to care for the materials, remove stains, and prolong the life of your investment. If you don’t hire anyone, you or your existing employees will shoulder that responsibility, which will get tricky during peak hours or if things get behind.

Hefty Mechanical Overhead

If you’re not convinced yet, we’re going to pull out the infomercial slogan, “But wait, there’s more!” Now you have the inventory, the space, and the staff, but you still need the equipment and materials to launder everything yourself.

You’ll need to purchase not only the commercial washer and dryer, but also a commercial grade iron, shelving for storage, and special eco-friendly laundry detergent and chemicals to treat stains and properly care for your linens. In addition to the supplies needed to launder your own linens, you will also want to consider budgeting for unexpected costs such as machine breakdown, paying for a commercial laundry service in an emergency, or hiring additional staff if business is booming. These unexpected expenses are in addition to the increased monthly bills you will be accruing. Your utility bills will increase due to higher usage and the fact that commercial-grade machines use much more energy than residential ones.

Think you can cut corners and just buy residential washers and dryers? Not so fast. Residential machines do not the muscle needed to properly treat and sanitize linens for public use.

Lost Time and Productivity for You

Finally, someone must manage all of this – additional staff oversight, monthly expenses, equipment maintenance, inventory management, and crisis control when things don’t go as planned. If you have a lot of extra time and money on your hands – go for it! – but if you would rather avoid the extra expense and aggravation, let us help. We’ve already written about the benefits of hiring a local linen company – you can check that out here – but we’re also happy to chat with you any time to review our options, pricing, and what best fit is for your company’s needs.

But you don’t have to take our word for it, check out what our customers say about renting linens with Your Linen Service!