Covid gives dry cleaners a dressing down

In a nation of slobs, Lan Pham is the canary in the coalmine.

Goodwood Dry Cleaners owner Lan Pham says business has dried up since the pandemic struck. Picture: Roy VanDerVegt

In a nation of slobs, Lan Pham is the canary in the coalmine.

As working from home becomes the new normal, and formal functions are postponed, cancelled and attendances slashed, the opening hours sign outside Ms Pham’s tiny Adelaide dry cleaning business tells a national story.

Ms Pham’s one-woman operation has seen business plunge and she now closes early most days as trackie dacks become the official uniform of Zoom meetings and tuxes and little black dresses hang unlaundered in wardrobes.

Her business, Goodwood Dry Cleaners, is in the affluent suburb of Parkside on the exclusive Unley Road strip, but even here in the heart of Adelaide’s middle class, things have never been worse.

“You just have to walk down the street and look at the way people are dressed to see what is going on,” Lan tells The Weekend Australian. “This is a lovely part of town but these days everyone is in jeans and T-shirts, track suits and hoodies. No one gets dressed up any more. They might have one nice shirt they put on when they do their meetings on the computer. The rest of the time people dress like slobs.”

As a hardworking migrant Australian, Ms Pham is typical of many business owners in the dry cleaning sector. She arrived in Australia as a refugee from Vietnam in 1982 and met her Vietnamese-born husband Minh in Adelaide. They operate two small drycleaners as a family business with their son and have no other staff.

“I love this country because it gave my family opportunity but I am worried now about how we will get through this if things don’t improve.”

“See this?” she asks, pointing to a clothes basket. “Two pairs of men’s trousers. It is almost lunch time and that’s all I have had dropped off today.

“My washer holds 20kg. It is not worth turning it on for that. The electricity will cost me more than what I get paid for cleaning.”

The story Lan tells is indicative of the pressures faced nationwide by the dry cleaning industry, nowhere more so than in Melbourne where the fourth lockdown threatens to send some operators to the wall.

Dry cleaners say they are the forgotten business victims of the lockdown, for unlike aviation, tourism, hotels and hospitality, they have no high-profile national leaders or prominent lobby group speaking for them.

Melbourne’s Nick Bancroft is a fourth-generation dry cleaner whose family started the business in 1913. Unlike Ms Pham in Adelaide, Bancroft’s Dry Cleaning is a big operation employing five full-time and seven casual staff on Toorak Rd, South Yarra.

As national treasurer and Victorian state president of the Dry Cleaning Institute of Australia, Mr Bancroft says he doesn’t know a single dry cleaner in Australia who hasn’t been struggling this past 12 months.

He would normally launder and iron between 2500 to 3000 business shirts a week but is now lucky to do 300.

As with Mrs Pham, Mr Bancroft has also slashed his hours. Before the pandemic he opened 7am to 7pm Monday to Saturday and 8am to 5pm Sundays; now he is open 7am-4pm Monday through Saturday and 8am to 1pm Sunday.

“Those hours aren’t numbers. They represent real people with real families, people with bills to pay,” he told The Weekend Australian.

“Each lockdown bites us a little bit harder. Today I had to tell six of my staff that I had no hours for them tomorrow.

“It is tough everywhere but it is obviously at its worst here in Victoria. Melbourne has always been the fashion capital, the sports capital, the food capital and the culture capital. You shut those things down, you ban people from going to the office, and the contents of our washing baskets tells the story. It’s so sad. Melbourne has become a miserable place to live and a miserable place to run a business.”

Mr Bancroft said almost every avenue of business activity and human interaction shut or curtailed by Covid involved dry cleaning.

“You think about the restaurants closing – all those pressed shirts and jackets for the waiters are huge contracts for commercial drycleaners and that all vanished overnight.”

It’s a comment backed by Adelaide’s leading suit hire business, Ferrari Formalwear, where state manager Marlee Phillips says business has now bounced back after a tough 2019.

“It has been good for us because a lot of these functions that were cancelled and postponed have all been rescheduled in a rush,” she said.