Convenience store and gas station. Dry cleaning laundromat. These are prime examples of a dual business with which we are all familiar. But what the heck is a dry cleaning newspaper?
I’m not sure, but I was about to find out after purchasing one in southwestern Pennsylvania.
After meeting with the owner of the dual business during Labor Day weekend in 2004, I looked at my wife and said, “How is this going to work?”
It was more of a statement than a question.
I was completely psyched about running my own newspaper. However, I had zero interest in operating a dry cleaners. Not to mention the fact I didn’t know the first thing about it.
Well, my wife was psyched for a totally different reason. We were moving back to the place she called home. And, it was also the place where I spent my childhood days in elementary school.
I think she would have bought a live bait shop and it wouldn’t have phased her as long as it was located in the land of her upbringing. Regardless, we were about to drop $15K for a business I knew inside and out and another I knew absolutely nothing about.
The owner told us the only reason she was selling was because she had accepted the position of borough secretary for the town where the newspaper was located and it was a conflict of interest. The truth is that she was in debt up to her eyeballs; and she made enemies of almost everyone in town. Needless to say, the public didn’t have a very high regard for the publication.
Being a newspaper man for over three years, I was astonished at the realization I was actually going to be the owner/publisher of my very own weekly newspaper. Of course, I was going into it without all the facts. It was like the blind leading the blind.
And as far as the dry cleaning business, well it was a walk in the park. In fact, it wasn’t a dry cleaners at all. It was a dropoff point for the dry cleaners in another nearby town. And we were the go between.
Basically, it was service for people who were to lazy to carry their own “dry clean only” laundry to the next town themselves.
Although I had my reservations about how all this was going to work, we jumped in with both feet.
After another meeting, we signed all the necessary paperwork. We crossed all our “t’s” and dotted all our “i’s.” Then we gave the former owner a check and she hightailed it out of there and raced to the bank to cash it!
We found out in short order that owning a dry cleaning business wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. But, of course, neither was the newspaper. It was very hard work, indeed.
I was responsible for going out and getting the news and coming back and writing up all the storie, while my wife was the receptionist, advertising agent, and dry cleaning hostess.
As far as the newspaper was concerned, we were still stuck in the mid-20th Century with pasting up the newspaper on the waxing table like a huge jigsaw puzzle.
I had to measure out the space for the photos and count the number of lines and columns to place stories. Then after my wife printed everything, I had to cut out the stories, photos, and captions and put them through the waxer. Then I had to roll them onto the huge double page sheets. In addition, I had to make sure page 12 and page 1 were together as well as page 11 and 2 and so on and so on.
It was enough to give anyone a migraine headache.
The bad thing is that we had to wait until deadline Tuesday to put it all together. We soon realized locking the doors and drawing the blinds was the only way we could ever get done in time.
We had until 5 p.m. to put the paper to bed by getting it to Brownsville, a satellite office 30 minutes away. If we missed that deadline, we had to drive an hour to Uniontown where the paper was printed.
Needless to say, we only made the 5 p.m. deadline about a half dozen times.
To make matters worse, we had to drop off the laundry at the “real” dry cleaners on the same night. We quickly realized it was in our best interest to change the day of laundry drop off as well as pickup.
To the chagrin of some of the general public, we permanently closed the so-called dry cleaners after owning the dual business for only two months. It was either that or lose my sanity.
Speaking of which, I was about to lose it when the former owner began making weekly visits to our establishment to collect money from the previous month’s advertising as if we were an ATM.
It was a microscopic clause in our seller’s agreement.
Since the advertising for the previous month’s editions wasn’t billed until the end of the month, she gave herself 45 days to collect the monies for said advertising.
I planned on giving her a single check at the conclusion of the 45-day period. Well, after our first week in business, that plan went out the window. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, we quickly discovered she was badmouthing our good name long before we actually bought the business.
Exactly, how does that work?
We get her out of debt and she soils or reputation?
How’s that for gratitude?
The last straw came when she steamrolled her way in one morning and took several file folders of bad debt — advertisers that never paid their bills going back some two years.
After finding out what happened, I immediately called her at the borough office and told her in no uncertain terms that she was no longer welcome in our business and her last check would be mailed to her.
If only that were the end of the story. But that’s for another column…