What time should a retail store in Double Bay be cleaned?

A very common arrangement in the Knox Street, Cross Street and Bay Street retail strip is a short cleaning visit shortly before opening. It is understandable — owners want the store cleaned as close to trade as possible — but it produces the opposite of what it intends.

In a compressed window the cleaner works fast and wet. Glass gets one pass and air-dries streaked, which the morning sun on a Knox Street frontage then displays to everyone walking past. Floors are still damp at opening. Fitting rooms, which take real time, get dropped first. The store opens looking worse than if it had been cleaned properly six hours earlier.

A 90-minute early round on a typical 90 to 120 square metre Double Bay boutique should complete all of the following, in order, with everything dry and reset well before trade.

The cost that never appears on an invoice is retail wages spent re-cleaning. When staff routinely spend the first fifteen or twenty minutes of trade going over glass and mirrors, that is real money — on a seven-day roster it can approach seven or eight hours of wages a month, which frequently exceeds the difference between an inadequate cleaning contract and a proper one.

The second cost is brand. In a suburb where a customer walks past four comparable stores in two minutes, a streaked window is a comparison your competitor wins for free.

Double Bay retail is full of honed marble, travertine and polished stone, and a large share of it is being slowly destroyed by acidic supermarket floor cleaner. The damage is gradual — a grey cast in the traffic lane, a loss of sheen over 18 months — so it is rarely attributed to the cleaning product until someone tests a small area with the correct one.

Stone needs pH-neutral product only, with periodic diamond-pad burnishing to restore sheen. Etching already driven into the surface cannot be reversed by cleaning, which is worth knowing before you pay for repeat treatments that will not fix it.