By Jeana Doescher
Hour Glass Dry Cleaners is located at 426 Lake Street in Excelsior. The building looks kind of like a 50’s diner with a lot of glass windows. The atmosphere inside is friendly and casual. A uniform is not required, but you have to wear a name tag and you cannot wear hats or sunglasses while you are working.
When I first started there I had no idea how busy dry cleaners get! Mondays and Saturdays is non-stop customers, picking up and dropping off dry cleaned and laundered shirts, but the work is fun and the other employees are nice. My job does not consist of dry cleaning, but of ringing in orders, safety pinning tags to orders (which either go on the laundry or dry cleaning side), and retrieving clothing items for customers that want to pick them up. Payment usually comes with pick-up.
The laundry side is usually men’s dress shirts. Men or their wives can choose between no starch, light starch, medium starch, and heavy starch. The starch is poured in the wash. The dry cleaning side is Hour Glass’s specialty. Most of the clothes we get can only be dry cleaned. We tag-in each piece and then bundle for the cleaners and the pressers to complete the next day, or to be completed on Monday because we’re closed on Sundays. I usually work from 3:00 to 8:00 p.m. 2 or 3 days a week. It’s a good job for teenage kids.