Covid has shifted from a pandemic to an endemic illness still requiring extra precautions. We have still maintained the best practices we developed during the pandemic stage to protect our customers and our team members.
As a personal note from our owners, we want to assure all our existing and prospective new customers that we have taken numerous precautions and steps to protect both our customers and our team members who interact with the clothing of our customers from catching or transmitting the virus. We could list these steps in great detail, as other businesses initially did at the beginning of the pandemic.
Instead, we will speak personally as the owners of the business, and then give you a sense of the overall procedures we still use. One of our three young children has a rare neurological condition that is effected by anything that compromises his immune system. Therefore, our family is much like families with elderly parents at home … at higher risk of potential medical consequences from Covid-19.
So, we knew from the start of Covid that if we let a member of our team catch the virus it could expose us and our family, and ultimately our children. Hence, we have acted with great rigor to avoid viral spread both among members of our team and across surfaces the clothing of our customers touches, as though the life of our child depends on it. This is very personal for us. Everything you would expect, we do.
This still in the endemic stage includes wiping surfaces with cleaning wipes between customers, keeping our team members physically distanced from each other at separated workspaces or workspaces separated by plastic barriers, and keeping any team member who reports cold like symptoms out of the work environment unless they have a negative Covid test.
Though masks are no longer mandated, our production team members who wash and fold laundry are asked to wear masks during periods when the virus is prevalent, as opposed to at a low (i.e. summer vs. winter months, or as reported in positive test percentages and the number of active cases locally). New customers who do not already have our zip shut duffle bags are asked to place clothing in either sealed garbage bags or other laundry bags, which are then placed by our driving team members directly in our duffle bags and labeled. If a new customer leaves laundry in an open laundry basket, we will bypass that pickup, or potentially call the customer and give them a chance to seal their clothing.
Our driving team members that are just interacting with closed bags may not currently wear masks all the time, as they did during the pandemic stages. However, they are keenly alert to the potential of catching Covid from a person outside our team with whom they interact. You may see our driving team members (who only interact with closed, sealed or zip shut bags) not wearing masks during pickups when the virus is at a low point of spread. However, they carry masks in the vans and in their pockets. If they suspect they may be picking up laundry in person rather than just picking up or leaving a bag at a doorstep, or if they are going to be walking through a crowded condominium or apartment complex where they may be passing multiple people, they will generally pull a mask out of their pocket and put it on.
We do not allow people other than our team members into our vans. When the pandemic began, we stopped using car washes and began having our team members wash our vans periodically at self-use, jet spray car washes. We have continued this protocol. (In fact, this option is now the only available option, as our high roof, full size vans require hand washing, and drought restrictions now prevent the reputable car washes that adhere to drought restrictions from hand washing vehicles due to the inability to recycle water.)