Secret shopper comes clean
Shopping centres may have a high footfall, but they don’t have to be high maintenance, says Denis Rawlins MD, James White. After a mystery shopping tour, he reveals six common cleaning pitfalls.
cleanliness. The same system can rapidly clean up spills on escalators.
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Shopping centres are designed to please the crowds and make us spend. It may be true that ‘retail is detail’, but a tour of the stores shows their cleaning routines are not always on the money.
Typically, most cleaning is performed out of hours. Larger floor areas are often cleaned by big scrubber dryers, with mops and wipes used in washrooms, and periodic deep cleans of these and other areas, like escalators and high- level surfaces.
As spaces become progressively dirtier in the meantime, is this the inevitable price to be paid in a high-traffic setting? Or are customers being short-changed? Our experience shows that centre managers themselves and their tenants too are often getting a bad deal.
What are the pitfalls? 1
Most shopping centres have matting designed by architects. With lots of aluminium and plastic, these
mats are easy on the eye – but also on dirt, and don’t absorb water either. Good quality matting stops 80-90% of moisture and soils entering a building, saving on cleaning time and costs.
Rather than renting extra mats at times of heavy rain, purchasing quality mats – which can be easily cleaned as part of the floor cleaning routine – can produce large savings. Cleaning needs to be daily in winter to reduce the risk of slips and falls. In times of snow or heavy rain, cleaning can be done by using a trolley-based wet vacuum to remove water, salt, grit and dirt.
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Escalators may only be cleaned every six months by a specialist contractor at great expense. A modern,
manual system that’s lightweight and low-tech, such as REN Clean, can clean a full escalator in 15 minutes – for as little as £6.50 in consumable costs. So, cleaning can be done weekly, in-house, for less, and with better grip and
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Spills on floors are commonplace and hazardous. A ‘crash cart’ – the size of a shopping trolley, with trash
bin, litter picker, wet vac, hose and wand, and automatic mopping – provides a rapid response. Not only will such a system (the OmniFlex SUV) tackle the spill in seconds, the perfectly dried floor avoids the need for ‘wet floor’ signs – and the slippery slope to litigation.
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Washrooms are a constant battle. Mops, buckets, sprays and cloths only aid the enemy – germs and
toxins embed in every crevice, spreading infections and bad odours. Such tools defeat and demean cleaning operatives. In contrast, spraying all surfaces with cleaning solution and wet-suctioning away the soils, leaves washrooms clinically clean and fresh. Such a system (Kaivac’s No Touch Cleaning) can take a third of the time of manual methods, providing a daily deep clean in the same time as a spot clean.
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High-level areas are often left to specialists, and until the accumulated dust is all too evident. Using mobile work
platforms and scissor-lifts, this work tends to be expensive and disruptive.
Again, there is another way: ultra-lightweight carbon- fibre poles, combined with a high-powered vacuum. With similarly light, yet highly effective cleaning heads and tools, this system (called SpaceVac) also has an in-built video camera for viewing and recording cleaning progress. Not only is cleaning elevated areas safe and easy from ground level, the task is well within the reach of in-house cleaning teams and budgets.
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Internal and external glass can raise similar access problems. Again, lightweight carbon-fibre poles and
attachments using pure water cleaning systems provide a high-reach solution.
Labour accounts for 80% or more of cleaning budgets. Outsourcing to specialists – and deep cleans due to inadequate routine cleaning – are the other major expense. Savvy managers can cut these costs by equipping their cleaning teams to do more, faster and better, achieving consistently higher cleaning standards.
Retailers are cost-conscious competitors and innovators. Yet there are tidy savings to be made from smarter cleaning kit – or what we call ‘return on innovation’.
www.rawlins.co.uk twitter.com/TomoCleaning
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