Tide getting clothes cleaner, one locker full at a time

I grew up in a Tide household and, until a recent conversion to Persil prompted largely by the fact that the hardware/general store on Charles Street carries it, I remained largely brand loyal over the decades.

Enough so, that a Tide jingle from my childhood still manages to rattle around in my brain:

My dog is very friendly, but especially when he’s wet.
I found I couldn’t change my dog, I changed to Tide instead.
Tide gets clothes cleaner, ‘cuz Tide makes water softer.
If you want clothes cleaner, you’d better use Tide.

Anyway, Tide is the best selling detergent in the U.S., so when I was Tide-loyal, I wasn’t alone.

But Procter & Gamble isn’t satisfied with having dominant market share for laundry detergent. They’re getting into the dry cleaning biz. And the do-your-laundry-for-you business. In doing so, P&G:

…is looking to the future, and the future can’t be bothered to pair up its socks. Millennials and Gen Z are less loyal to traditional detergent brands, market research has found, and they wear their clothing many more times before washing. And because they place a high value on their free time, they will outsource their chores to get more of it.(Source: Boston Globe)

About that “wear their clothing many more times before washing.” How does this work when it’s 100 degrees out? Doesn’t Gen Z sweat?

So the company has been exploring “out of home” options under the Tide Cleaners name. With the pithy slogan “Life, Not Laundry,” Tide now operates 140 dry cleaning stores in 19 states…

Personally, I like doing laundry and always have. (Oddly – or not – it’s the favored chore of both my sisters, as well.) There is nothing more satisfying than having those folded piles of clean laundry to stow away. (And nothing more irksome than finding a stray dirty sock stuck in the corner of the hamper after you’re all done.) When I was a kid, my family didn’t have a dryer, so laundry involved pinning clothing up on the outdoor clothesline, and taking it down when it was dry. And with a family of seven, each member of which took a two-towel shower or bath every day and never used the same towel twice, there was always plenty of laundry to get done.

These days, my laundry needs as a single elder aren’t all that great – other than when it’s 100 degrees out and a two-minute trip to the mailbox requires a shower and full change of clothing – yet the task is immensely satisfying. In fact, as I write this post, I’ve got a load in the building’s dryer.

Anyway, P&G isn’t just focusing on the rising professional cadre of Millennials and Gen Z’s whose careers don’t allow them the time to revel in laundry doing. They’re also offering their cleaning services for students:

…Tide University is cleaning students’ clothes at 23 colleges, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Is anyone else wondering how students, so plagued with debt they take out for their $70K a year educations, can afford a laundry service as opposed to doing their wash for themselves? Is it because they’re working too many hours to pay for their education? Or is it just, hey, what’s another thousand bucks to pay for laundry services over four years?

College for me was a continuation of my laundry learning experience.

While I’d done plenty of laundry over the years, it was only after I was completely responsible for my own laundry and paying quarters to get it done that I realized that you do not need to use a clean towel every time you take a shower. This was something of a revelation, I can tell you. Live and learn.

Anyway, Tide Cleaners sets up laundry lockers in apartment buildings where folks can drop off their clothing for dry cleaning and/or old fashioned wash. It’s returned 48 hours later, all nicely folded, and the customer gets pinged to let them know it’s ready.

Tide Cleaners says it’s priced competitively when it comes to dry cleaning.

And it offers wash-dry-and-fold plans starting at $29.99 a month for 20 pounds of laundry or $99.99 for 80 pounds.

I have no idea how many pounds of laundry I do each month. I suspect it’s somewhere in between 20 and 80 pounds. But this sounds really expensive to me. (I’ll have to check with my brother Rick on what he pays. Rick is single and has a very demanding job. He clearly didn’t develop the Rogers girls fondness for doing laundry – no surprise, given that the Rogers boys didn’t actually do any laundry – and he’s been having his washing done by the same folks who do his dry cleaning for years.)

In addition to their apartment building lockers, Tide plans to have them in retail outlets as well. (They’re actually not doing the work themselves. It’s outsourced to local outfits who promise to use Tide detergent. Tide is mostly doing the marketing. And the local outfits are trying to figure out how they can make any money, given that the mighty P&G is wringing their profit margins out of existence. Where have we heard this before?)

Here’s something I found astounding:

According to the US Department of Labor, the average American consumer spends 375 hours a year dealing with laundry.

That’s over 7 hours a week. And even if your laundry takes 7 hours a week to get done, it’s not like you’re bending over a galvanized washtub using a scrub board, and then churning wet duds through a ringer. If there’s a load in the dryer or the washer, if you’re at home you’re or at the laundromat, you can be doing something else. If you’re staring at the machine watching your load wash or dry through the window, that’s on you.

Given work-from-home and business casual, the dry cleaning biz has been on the decline for a while. Leading some to wonder why Tide would “want to get into the game now and risk diluting the potency of its brand?”

P&G may actually have a larger goal in mind, says Howard Yu, author of “Leap: How to Thrive in a World Where Everything Can Be Copied.”

“P&G has no direct consumer interface. They sell the detergent to e-commerce sites or retailers, then they lose the relationship,” Yu said. So the Tide Cleaning business is an opportunity for the company to collect data on its users and “keep itself relevant for the second half of the 21st century.” Add the consumer behavioral data the company is now collecting from smart appliances, and it creates a fuller picture of who we are and how we (attempt to) keep clean.

So now I have to worry about whether the communal washing machine in my building is reporting our laundry habits to P&G HQ, and whether they know whether I disloyally switched brands to Persil. Fortunately (or not) I really don’t have to worry about being relevant in the second half of the 21st century.

Anyway, if P&G and Tide are spying on my building, I wonder what they make of the lovely but OCD women upstairs who washes a half-dozen pairs of Lanz flannel PJs, a half-dozen men’s 2XL white T-shirts, and a whole bunch of white towels, every other day on the extra-heavy duty cycle. And dries them as stiff as salt cod.