She’s either cleaning clothes or joining a folk ensemble.
Laundry always kind of sucked
That’s why kings and rich fish merchants had servants do it for them. Regular folks had to do it themselves.
So when any innovation came along—I do mean any—the line to use it wrapped around the block a few times. Late in the Industrial Revolution, some real visionary had the idea to use gasoline to wash clothes. After all, only a few big machines used gas, so there was plenty to go around. That idea didn’t fizzle like you might expect, but caught on like wildfire. Soon everybody was washing their clothes in gas, or more likely, paying somebody else to.
🎵 It’s not fully clean till it’s drenched in gasoline… 🎵
This had predictable—uh—blowback.
Gas explosions were common enough that many cities and states passed strict regulation of the practice. Eventually, William Joseph Stoddard invented a chemical cleaner that only exploded very occasionally, which was a big improvement. By the 1930s, no professional would clean with gasoline anymore. But a whole lot of penny-pinching homemakers remembered their mothers and grandmothers cleaning with gas while they were growing up. So they used this cheap alternative to expensive soaps, machines, and services.
This home cleaning hack was so prevalent and so deadly a public service announcement was made to address it (among other home fire hazards):
The thing about gasoline was that it worked.
It was easy to obtain and cleaned clothes better than mangling your fingers scrubbing on a washboard. It was a quick fix, but it had downsides…like singeing off your eyebrows, blowing out the side of your house, or incinerating your entire body.
There are lots of quick fixes for your business that can also blow up in your face.
- You can run some sales and get that sweet cash in your pocket right now. But eventually, you’ll train your customers to only buy from you when they get that perfect discount.
- You can save money and time for today by foregoing training and team building for tomorrow.
- You can allow that likable manager who can’t seem to figure out their role to just keep bumbling through things till something really goes wrong.
Or you can do the work now that leads to a healthy business in 5, 10, 20 years. Some of it is surprisingly easy. A lot of it is hard. If you need some help getting started, give us a call.