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Friday 29 March 2024
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Should You Buy or Hire Your Restaurant Linens?

Should You Buy or Hire Your Restaurant Linens?

Running a restaurant is a very difficult endeavour. Most restaurants fail very quickly because they take on too many expenses and too much debt. The amount of start-up costs for restaurants differ depending on what sort of restaurant you open, but the fact remains that restaurants rarely turn a profit in their first few years. You have to secure the location for your restaurant, which likely requires a large deposit and payment for a few months of rent. Then you have to set up your utilities such as water, gas, and electricity. Restaurants use a lot more water, gas, and electricity than other types of businesses so your utility costs are going to be very high. You then have to hire a staff that is talented and competent. You have to furnish your entire restaurant and then you have to buy all of the food that you actually want to cook. All of that takes place before you ever even open your doors. Those are a lot of expenses to stack up all at once. If you can reduce those expenses and spread them out until at least you have a few customers, you greatly increase your chances of keeping your business afloat. Hiring your restaurant linens is actually a great way to spread out your expenses.

Hire Your Restaurant Linens1

Linen Expenses

Your restaurant is going to need a lot of linens. You need chef’s coats, aprons for your wait staff, towels, tablecloths, napkins, and possibly a few more types of linens. These are going to cost you a lot of money. If you’ve already opened a restaurant before, you know how expensive restaurant linens can be. If you’ve never opened one before, you might be shocked by their expense. The very best linens are made from high-thread-count cotton that costs a good bit of money. Some restaurateurs attempt to save money by buying lower quality linens but that only saves you money at the outset. Lower-quality linens tend to stain easier and hold stains for longer. They also tend to degrade much faster in the repeated washings that are necessary.

When you buy lower-quality linens, you will have to wash them more often because they don’t repel stains as well as high-quality fabrics. However, they’re also more likely to break down in the washing so you are actually speeding up the process of ruining your linens by washing them, but they demand to be washed more often. As you know, you are less likely to return to a restaurant that has dingy aprons and tattered napkins. So, you might save 50% on your linens by buying a cheaper kind, but you’ll end up replacing them three or four times as fast. That’s a net loss of money.

Restaurant Linens

You can hire chef whites from Stalbridge Linens and get quality linens without the added expenses.

Hire Your Linens

Now you’re familiar with the upfront costs of buying linens: you can buy expensive linens and go further in debt or you can buy cheap linens and replace them constantly. There’s a third option, though. You can hire your linens from a quality supplier. A quality supplier of restaurant linens will provide you with high-quality fabrics for a low price.

They are invested in providing quality linens because cheap linens fall apart. Since they are renting out their linens, they still own them; therefore, they’re not going to rent out linens that are going to fall apart. They don’t want their linens to fall apart any more than you do. It’s in their best interests to hire the highest-quality linens on the market. That’s exactly what you get when you hire from a quality supplier. You’ll be getting great linens delivered to you. You won’t ever have to worry about replacing them. Also, you won’t ever have to worry about washing them.

Washing Expenses

As stated earlier, utility costs are incredibly high at restaurants. A lot of that is unavoidable; you have to wash your dishes, run your ovens and ranges, and keep the lights on. However, you don’t have to wash your linens if you hire them from a supplier.

To get your linens sufficiently clean, you need to wash them in hot water. That helps keep them clean and white because restaurant stains are some of the most persistent stains. When you run a washer on hot and then dry your linens on hot, it can cost you over £1 per load. If you are running your washer and dryer several times a day to keep all of your linens clean, you could be spending between £3 and £5 every day. Assuming you’re open seven days a week, that’s as much as £35 a week. Over an entire month, you could be spending about £1800 on washing and drying your linens alone. That’s an incredibly high amount of money that’s only going to add to the debt you have to incur to open up a business. It’s also a very wasteful use of natural resources. That £1800 figure doesn’t include the costs of replacing the linens either.

When you wash your linens repeatedly, they start to break down. When you’re trying to decide if you should hire your linens, you should add the cost of washing them, which is about £1800 for some restaurants, to the cost of buying new linens. Then, you should look at the cost of hiring linens from a quality supplier.

Energy Efficiency

Suppliers of linens are invested in keeping their linens looking as clean as possible for as long as possible. They’re also invested in gentle cleaning processes that aren’t too harsh on their linens because the longer they can keep each item looking good, the more profit they make. That’s also why they spend so much time and technology developing the most energy-efficient washing and drying processes possible. Their washing machines use as little water as possible and as little energy as possible. That’s just smart business and also happens to be great for the environment. You’ll save a lot of money hiring your linens from someone who is devoted to energy efficiency.