Rental and laundry services can simplify things for businesses. These companies specialize in laundry, so they can manage the process much better than most businesses can on their own. Their services are convenient, highly scalable and often cheaper than trying to perform these same types of services in-house.
Why Businesses Are Turning to Laundry Rental in 2024
Some of the major reasons a business might turn to laundry and linen rental services this year include:
1. Convenience
Renting linens and paying to have items laundered by a third party is fundamentally convenient. It takes more time and effort for a company to handle these things on its own.
Reducing the overall hassle a company deals with does more than reduce stress. It allows decision-makers to concentrate on other issues. After all, there’s only so much time in a day.
Many people view convenience as just a luxury. However, with convenience a company gains time. Time saved can be spent elsewhere to focus on profits. This is especially true if a business is using a robust managed linen service like the kind Alsco offers.
2. Scalability
Professional services like those Alsco offers are highly scalable. Alsco’s operation is large and aims to serve many clients without delay. If the needs of an individual client change, our model has the capacity to quickly adapt to that change.
If a business needs more linen and uniforms, they can be sent. If it needs less, they can be returned. The same is true of laundry. Companies like ours can handle a shifting laundry need seamlessly.
3. Sustainability
Linens and uniforms often needlessly get thrown away. Laundry can be expensive in terms of the power and water used. Even if a company tries to reduce its overall footprint, little things can stack up and have a significant environmental impact.
Sustainability is important to our team at Alsco. Through a combination of intense recycling efforts, special chemical formulations, large scale laundry service and more, our model is significantly more eco-friendly than what many other businesses can manage for themselves. We’ve focused and invested heavily in this area in an effort to deliver important services in a green way.
4. Maintenance
If a company buys its own linens and uniforms, it is responsible for maintaining them. If uniforms become too damaged, the company doesn’t have much recourse. It can only buy new linens and uniforms or repair what it has. Moreover, nothing can be repaired indefinitely.
Alsco allows a company to skip the burden of maintenance. As uniforms and linens become worn out, you can get them replaced (and usually at no extra cost). There’s less of a worry that your investments are deteriorating. On our end, our model is designed to handle this maintenance requirement in a way that can be challenging for nonspecialists to manage.
5. Specialization
Over time, a business learns how to refine its model. Employees also develop important skills, becoming faster, less prone to error and more efficient. Companies may be able to continually invest in themselves, improving what works and adjusting what doesn’t. If they stay focused, they can start to specialize, carving out a niche and mastering it.
Unless your business is a laundry business, it likely hasn’t spent significant resources bettering itself in that space. Compared to a specialist, that means your company likely needs to pay more and wait longer for the same amount of work to get done if it wants to do that laundry itself. If uniforms are instead rented, maintained and laundered by another company specializing in that niche, you’ll be able to benefit from a model built on providing those types of services without having to specialize in that area yourself.
6. Cost
In many cases, whether purchasing a laundry machine and doing it in-house or going out and having an employee wash laundry with a third-party service, the cost of doing laundry can be an easy expense to underestimate. This is especially true when one considers opportunity cost. Laundry takes time to do, and if done in-house, it takes up valuable space that could be used for other purposes.
If a company instead chooses to rent its linens and uniforms, it can skip the laundry process. With Alsco, the laundry is going to be done on our end, with materials regularly swapped out as needed.
While renting is still an expense, it often doesn’t represent the big jump in expenses many companies imagine it will be. Rather than thinking in terms of “not renting” to “renting,” instead think in terms of “self-supplying and laundering” versus “renting.”
Conclusion
Not every company needs to rent uniforms and linens or get its laundry done by a third party. What’s important is that one carefully considers the issue rather than just assuming it might be too costly. There can be many benefits to making the switch. The primary worry most companies have — that it will be expensive — often doesn’t align with reality.
At Alsco, we make it easy for businesses to rent whatever linens they might need with our rental services, and we can also provide cleaning and laundering services. If you’re interested in how Alsco can help you improve your model and simplify your business, contact our team today.