Crumpled clothing index can be a predictive tool!

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: Three months ago, Arthur C Anton, Jr chief operating officer of one of the largest dry cleaning firms in Massachusetts, Anton’s Cleaners, began noticing a change in the condition of the garments coming into his stores. “They’re more wrinkled,” he said. As a struggling nation tries to eke one (or several) more wearings out of garments before dry cleaning them, the behind-the-knee and elbow creases have become more pronounced, Anton said, and rings around the collars have gotten darker.

“You might take that pair of pants and maybe you’ll hang it up instead of having it cleaned right away,” he said.

Number crunchers, in other words, aren’t the only ones with a bead on the economy. Dry cleaners have predictive tools of their own. Think of it as the Crumpled Index, or the sartorial equivalent of Google’s new flu tracking tool, which may be able to pick up regional outbreaks a week to 10 days before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports them.

Indeed, in July, months before the National Bureau of Economic Research declared the United States was in a recession (on December 1), the president of Dependable Cleaners predicted the economy was headed for trouble. “I noticed the amount of clothing that hadn’t been picked up had grown by 30% compared with July 2007,” Christa Hagearty said, attributing the drop-off to high gas and home heating oil prices. “I said, ‘This is going to get worse.”’

Customers had begun waiting, on average, 10 days instead of the usual five to pick up their orders, she said. It makes sense. After all, dry cleaning doesn’t come cheap. At the family-owned Dependable chain, for example, prices range from $6.99 to $7.70 to dry clean a pair of pants, $6.15 to $8 for a blouse, and $14.50 to $16.30 for a suit.

In an attempt to minimise the backlog, the company started requiring deposits from clients on big-ticket items, and managers began placing friendly reminder calls to customers.

“Most of the time we got answering machines,” Hagearty said. Some brave enough to answer said they’d pick up some of the clothing now, some later, a strategy Hagearty empathises with.

“We absolutely understand that everyone is struggling with what they can afford today and what they can afford for next week,” she said.