DC -- Capitol Hill -- Metro Cleaners (307 5th St NE):
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MCLEAN_210112_01.JPG: Then I wandered up to Metro Cleaners. They weren't open when I got there, with a note saying they'd return at 2:30. They showed up about 2:40.
Mrs. Lee didn't want to be photographed and, frankly, they both acted awkward having me there. I mentioned the Smithsonian, read your description, and I had my badge on. Mr. Lee said he sometimes went to the museums but I'm not sure he understood why I was there. I spent about 30 minutes talking to them which was enjoyable.
They said they'd been in the country for 45 years. (Well, Mr. Lee had been here since 1973 and Mrs. Lee -- who refused to be photographed -- had been here since 1975 or so.) They'd been running Metro Cleaners since 1993 but the building itself was over a hundred years old. They said when COVID hit, their business went to hell. While they serve a lot of local customers, including a bunch of Congressional people, with COVID a lot of people stopped going to the office and no longer needed to dry clean their stuff. Weddings also declined, with smaller events and fewer people. They also said that rent and utilities continued pretty much at the same level as before -- I asked if they had gotten a reduction in their rent and they said no. (There were some language issues so they might have been confused by the question. After thinking about it, I wasn't sure that they would have rented instead of buying the place for 27 years. I'm not sure how commercial space works. Do small store owners pretty much always rent?) Fortunately, it was just them running the place so they didn't have any staff to pay.
They didn't think about making masks for some time. When COVID-19 hit, they ordered masks from China like everyone else did. Mrs. Lee said the quality of the masks wasn't that good. (I suggested that perhaps China kept the better masks for themselves and only the lower quality ones got exported.) It wasn't until around August that they decided to make their own masks for customers. They said elastic was hard to find initially but things have improved since. In total, they figured they had sold about 200 masks. I didn't ask how much the masks cost because I was afraid I'd have to buy one. Some masks were custom-made for people. Others were just there for purchase. They had a few different design styles as well as sizes (small children vs adults).
They said that now, of course, everyone has masks so they weren't making much money from it anymore.
They reminisced about how the store had been scouted as a movie location. They couldn't remember much about this -- maybe ten years ago, the star was either Julia (Roberts?) or Julianne (Moore?) or.... They weren't sure. They said the movie involved some drycleaning scenes that needed to be a period location. The scouts liked that their store looked old. The scout talked about the film company paying for some modifications to the place externally (it was supposed to be in NYC) and internally. They seemed excited about the prospect although they said that the studio would have basically taken over the whole place for two weeks and that would have shut out their regular customers. In any case, they ended up not using the location. I searched for motion pictures filmed in DC and maybe it was "Hannibal" (2000) with Julianne Moore. "The Pelican Brief" (1993) with Julia Roberts was probably filmed before they bought the place. Or maybe they got the name wrong.
I asked if the location was a dry cleaner before they moved in and he said no, it was a small grocery store. I asked if the "organic" sign outside was a remnant of that phase. (That was a stupid question on my part since no one gave a damned about organic anything back then.) They said no. Dry cleaners used to use a lot of toxic chemicals in their work and some years ago it was mandated that they switch to petroleum-based ones (which are classified as being "organic"). She said the old chemicals sometimes caused cancer for the operators. He said that if you entered a dry cleaner using the toxic stuff, you could smell it as soon as you walked in but now there's basically no smell at all. They said the switch required changing out the equipment so I guess it wasn't a cheap transition. They didn't seem to mind though.
"Perc" vs organic cleaners was yet another thing I had zero knowledge of. There's more information about this switch on https://www.bucco.us/difference-organic-perk-dry-cleaning/
We talked briefly about Korea (no one ever says "South Korea", do they?). He said that the country was changing and had too many skyscrapers now. I said my impression of Asia was that everyone was a chain smoker. They agreed but said even Korea was instituting non-smoking sections like most countries.
While I was there, someone picked up some shirts but otherwise things were quiet. Mrs. Lee kept hand-sewing something while I was there.
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