SOMA Valet Cleaners

My dry cleaning comes back smelling like a dirty towel. Never again!

My dry cleaning comes back smelling like petrochemicals

Convenience can be a double edged sword.
SOMA Valet cleaners service the Avalon buildings. Upon moving in they hook you up with a branded laundry bag — just throw your sullied and wrinkled attire inside, fill out a form and drop it off with the front desk. In a few days your clothes come back, clean, sharp and shiny (at least that’s what they want you to think). Thus, when it comes to convenience SOMA Valet simply cannot be beat.
Unfortunately, when it comes to anything else SOMA Valet can, and should, be beaten with extreme prejudice. They often miss small stains and wrinkles, rough up buttons without reinforcing them and generally strain garments more than other cleaners I have used.
If it took me 3+ years to wear out a shirt before, using SOMA Valet the same brand’s shirt would be worn out in 2 or less. Furthermore, when I’ve asked them for any simple repairs they always did an incredibly amateur job. Yet I still kept on using them because they were just so damn convenient!
Two incidents finally made me realize the obvious folly of my ways. First, they straight-​up ruined my wife’s favorite DvF dress. I was pissed off and wanted to demand satisfaction (or at least reimbursement). My wife, however, being a kind and gentle soul, didn’t want to do anything other than switch to different cleaners for herself. Meanwhile, despite dirty piles of evidence to the contrary, I told myself that while they didn’t understand the complexities of women’s fabrics they could still do a fine job with shirts and slacks. I wanted to believe harder than Mulder.
Alas, my house of laundry cards and plastic hangers came tumbling down in September. I had a shirt and a pair of jeans– both with buttons that came loose thanks to SOMA’s shoddy cleaning. I put the buttons in a ziploc bag, along with a note showing (with illustrations!) where to attach which button. I might as well have told them to shove the buttons up their butt.
When I got my clothes back the shirt had a foreign button with the wrong color thread on the cuff, and a button on the sleeve was newly missing! The jeans, however, didn’t even have a surrogate button and were furthermore missing a riveted fly button (which don’t come off easily).
To summarize: I gave them two buttons to reattach and the clothes came back with 4 buttons missing.
Suffice it to say, convenience should never supersede quality.
Fortunately, my wife has graciously offered to take my clothes to her wonderful dry cleaner so now I have the latter without sacrificing the former.