A question that we often receive is why Rinse only picks up and delivers orders between 8pm and 10pm. With other similar services like Instacart and Doordash delivering at all hours of the day, it’s a pretty understandable question.
The short answer: we maintain a two hour delivery window in order to save you money!
We're able to charge the prices that we do because we keep our operations as efficient as possible.
When you give us an item to clean, we pick it up, take it to our warehouse to check it in, take it to one of our cleaning partners, carefully clean it, pick it up from a cleaning partner, take it back to our warehouse to we can check it out to a Valet, and deliver that item back to your front door. That's a lot of travel for one dress shirt (or skirt, or suit, or whatever). The only way that doesn't cost our customers major dollars is because we do everything we can to streamline operations. Our consistent 8pm to 10pm delivery window is just one of about 15 tactics that make up our secret sauce for smooth and affordable operations.
We’re able to execute the same operations each day in batches rather than on a one-off basis which is much more efficient. For example, with order pickup and delivery, we're able to go from house to house in a certain neighborhood like a honey bee, picking up and delivering clothes in your area rather than ping ponging back and forth all over town throughout the day. Since we pay our Valets hourly, that makes a huge difference when it comes to cost savings, and we’re able to pass that along to our customers.
We choose the 8pm to 10pm window because that’s when most customers are home (though with Rinse Drop, customers don’t need to be) and because traffic has usually died down at that point, making it easier for our Valets to get where they need to go.
We’ve put a lot of thought into why we do things the way we do and we’re always happy to share with our customers. If you ever have any questions, just reach out to our helpful Care team at [email protected] or visit our FAQs.
