World Games chief gets taken to the cleaners
You know how it goes. You’re on a business trip. Your laundry starts piling up. You stuff it in one of those hotel laundry bags and drop it in the hall outside your room. A day or two later, your clothing comes back cleaned and pressed.
The one thing you usually don’t do is to check the price list on the laundry bag. You just want to get the jelly off your favorite shirt.
John Long, chairman of the World Games 2010 Foundation, was in Hong Kong recently to attend the equestrian competitions that were part of the Beijing Olympics.
He stuffed a couple of pairs of slacks, a couple shirts and a couple of this and that into a hotel cleaning bag. It came back nicely cleaned and pressed — with a bill for “190 American dollars,” Long told the foundation’s board on Thursday.
These “outrageous prices” produced laundry sticker shock, he said, until the guests at the hotel discovered “a real Chinese laundry” was not far away.
Long began to see people lugging bundles of clothing down the street at all hours of the day and night.
Business got so good, the laundry had to hire more people.
There was one other glitch in what was otherwise “a great experience” in China, he said.
At the competition sites, “the American hot dog was taken to a new low.” It was boiled. “It was horrible,” Long said. “It was not any good.”
