Where's George Jefferson When You Need Him?

So I'm sitting at work and I reach around the cuff of my shirt and I notice something is missing. One of the buttons has come off my shirt. Now this is a brand new shirt that I just got back from the dry cleaners and when I took it in there it had all the buttons. This is also the second time in three weeks that I've gotten a shirt back from the cleaners with fewer buttons on it then it had when I dropped it off.

I've been having a lot of problems with dry cleaners lately and it is starting to piss me off. This is just another service industry that has gotten sloppy over the years. I know, how can I generalize about an entire business based on a few bad apples?

This is my second dry cleaners in a year. I dropped the first one after an incident regarding a hole in my suit. I have a suit which must be cursed. Whenever I wear it, I spill on it. It is beige so stains don't just fade on it but are there in all their glory for the world to ridicule. Anyway, one day I notice a tiny hole near the waist of the pants. I take it to the cleaners to fix (I know, mistake one, never go to a cleaners for any complex work). I may have said while pointing to the hole "can you patch this up for me" vs. "can you fix this" or "can you sew this up." I don't know if I said that, but you can see where this story is going.

A few days later I go to pick up the suit. I take it home and put it in my garment bag that I take to the gym when I decide just for the heck of it look at how they did fixing the hole. I pull out the pants and where the hole was is a patch that says "Super." I'm not kidding. They actually put a motherfucking patch on a Brooks Brothers suit. Livid, I march up to the store and say "what the hell is this?" The woman looks at me and says "you no like?" I say "why would I want a patch on a suit? This isn't a pair of jeans and I'm not ten years old!" She said: "Oh no, is very popular." I won't go into what I said to that since it probably wasn't too politically correct and had to do with what types might appreciate a patch that says "super" on a suit. I really wish I'd taken a photo of the pants so this could be fully appreciated.

Anyway, I dumped them and went to another dry cleaners and was relatively pleased except that I didn't like that they don't have a cardboard thing around the top of the hanger for suit jackets and sport coats. Now though these clowns have lost two buttons and the one time I specifically asked for something to be ready on a certain date they failed to deliver. It wasn't their fault ultimately, but it still infuriated me.

My grandfather was a dry cleaner so I don't want anyone thinking I'm some stuck up ass who wants what he wants when he wants it and doesn't have any respect for a hard working cleaner. I have a brother who runs an auto repair shop. I am no stranger to the service industry and I have all the respect in the world for the folks who bust their ass to keep my clothes clean, car running, toilets flushed, etc. What I don't respect is sloppy work. What I don't respect is a place that seems to take buttons off my shirts and takes its customers for granted. Part of it is that while each of these plays is different, all the shirts and pants end up going to the same place to get cleaned. It's sort of like when Homer visits the Duff Brewery. All the various brands of Duff---Duff Lite, Duff Ice, Duff Dry--are coming out of the same pipe.

I know we all have these little problems we deal with and not everything will go our way all the time. I get that. But I have just noticed lately that the quality of dry cleaners in general is going down hill. It's no different then the quality of phone service. Try calling information for a number. Used to be a time when you called and you got an operator in the city you were calling who actually might have heard of the place whose number you seek. Now if you are lucky and call 411 in New York you will at least get someone in the United States. But if you think you will get someone who knows that Sixth Ave. and Avenue of the Americas are the same street, just forget it.

Now, if anyone knows a good dry cleaners on the Upper Westside around 100th Street...