Pros and Cons of Using a Professional Linen Services

Many larger businesses and facilities that deal with linens on a daily basis turn to the use of a professional linen service in order to get those items cleaned, pressed and ready for use. However, a laundry service is not always the best option, just like hiring individuals to launder those linens, for some companies, is also inefficient. For nursing homes, hospitals, restaurants and hotels, there are many positives and negatives as far as sorting out linen are concerned.

On the positive side, linen services save the establishment time and manpower. Rather than going through the process of hiring housekeeping staff to take care of the linens for a hospital, hotel or nursing home, the time of the administration can be better spent managing the other daily aspects of the facility. There is no rapid employee turnover in the laundry department, either, since linens are simply picked up and dropped off on a regular basis. For restaurants, a this type of service makes even more sense as far as staffing is concerned. Many eating establishments are so small that it simply does not make sense, monetarily, to hire individuals dedicated to cleaning linens every night.

The need for fewer staff members may make the hiring of linen services more cost-effective for larger businesses and health care facilities, but services are actually less affordable for smaller establishments. A diner in a small town might be charged more in order to have restaurant linens picked up and dropped off regularly, and the proprietor of a family owned eatery will likely find it cheaper to just take the tablecloths and napkins home and launder them himself than hire the work out to someone else.

Delivery time is also a factor to consider when debating whether or not to hire a linen service. Larger cities will have a much faster turnaround rate for clean linens than smaller areas where only an individual or single business may provide linen service. In any case, a business that hires a linen service takes a chance on not having its items ready for use when they are needed. When clean and sanitary linens are necessary, such as with hospital linens and those for nursing homes, this can create a huge problem that is avoided by just hiring laundry staff to do the work in-house.

Organization and sanitation are two final factors to consider. Most of today's more successful linen businesses document every pick-up and delivery and arrive on a schedule set by the business hiring out the restaurant linen or hospital linen services. This takes a huge load off of the business owner or administrator as it puts someone else in charge of coordination of efforts and making sure every item that goes out also returns. Linen services are also able to properly sanitize the items they clean, which may or may not be the case in an internally run system.

Whether linen services are good or bad for a business boils down to the needs of each individual establishment. For some, linen services are a worthwhile investment, and for others they are an expensive exercise in futility when the work could be done better and cheaper in-house.