Every business has its unforgettable customers, and a diaper service is no exception. Richard Conley sounds as if he`s recalling root-canal surgery when he talks about his ”impossible customer.”
The woman wanted her baby to wear not just clean but absolutely perfect diapers. A worn spot, a small hole, a discoloration disqualified a diaper from the honor of being worn–and soiled–by her infant. Conley, manager of Baby`s Perfect Dy Dee Wash, Chicago`s largest diaper service, put the woman on
”select” service so she would receive especially clean diapers. The returns continued.
”She`d return them if one thread was hanging out,” he said. ”Finally we went so far as to give her brand-new diapers every week. We won, I think. Some people around here said she was too much trouble, but I won`t let them take that attitude. It`s important to us not to lose a customer.”
That attitude probably kept diaper services in business through the lean years of the last two decades, when a falling birth rate and disposable diapers seemed to be pushing the diaper service industry into the museum along with doctors who make house calls. And that attitude–plus other factors
–seems to have done the trick: The lean years are over; cotton diapers and diaper services are making a comeback.
”I have an ingrained notion that cotton diapers are better for the baby,” said Marian Brown, 38, of Highland Park, who has used the Baby`s Perfect diaper service since the birth of her daughter Alice 20 months ago.
”Maybe it`s superstition. But I also like reusing them instead of throwing them away.”
”We compared different ways of diapering,” said Ruth Binder, 29, of Wauconda. ”We decided to go with cotton diapers because there`s less diaper rash, but I couldn`t face up to the idea of washing them myself. Besides, the service gets them cleaner than I could. And the fact that they deliver was a big factor. I just wish I could find more places that deliver things.”
”I`ve used a diaper service for all four of my kids,” said Christine Doetsch, 33, of Inverness. ”I guess I`m a little old-fashioned. But also the disposables don`t seem to hold up as well as cloth. They leak sometimes. I`m really not big on them at all.”
The gain in business is difficult to measure because diaper services, like other businesses, are hesitant about giving too much information to competitors. But Conley says his service has picked up 240 customers in the last month and he hopes to end the year 10 to 12 percent ahead of last year. Mary Hilton, who owns Gary-based Cottontails, the second largest diaper service in the Chicago area, says her business has tripled since 1978. Procter and Gamble, the first to manufacture disposables (Pampers) and most popular, is not exactly running for cover. The company estimates that 16 billion disposables of all brands are sold in a year; 75 percent of all diaper changes are made with disposables.
The gain in business is hard to determine, but the reasons for the gain and the types of families who are leading the way are well known. Pat Irons, editor of Baby Talk magazine, has found in talking to parents that cloth diapers and diaper services generally cost less than disposables, which seem to cause more diaper rash and decompose slowly in landfills.
”Some parents are just swinging back to natural ways of doing a lot of things,” she said. ”Natural childbirth is in, so is breast-feeding, and so parents think their children`s first clothes should be natural, too.”
Because diapering methods vary from family to family, it is almost impossible to say with certainty that babies in cloth diapers get less diaper rash than those in disposables. But common sense and the impressions of parents and doctors are on the side of cloth.
”Disposables are too effective,” said Dr. Richard Burnstine, a Northbrook pediatrician. ”They`re airtight and they`re watertight, so once a baby is wet, he`s wet all the time. Cotton lets air in, so the diaper can dry out. I try to point my patients in the direction of cotton.”
The mothers who sign up for diaper service tend to be, in the words of Jack Mogavero, president of Sketchley Diaper Services Inc., ”a little above middle income, a little more upscale, a little more well-read.”
”And a little older,” added Hilton, who started in the business 23 years ago with a service she ran from the basement of her Kalamazoo home.
”These are the same gals who talked manufacturers into removing salt and food coloring from baby food.”
”The more people know, the better off we are,” said Conley, whose company, the descendant of the first diaper service in the country, is part of the Sketchley corporation`s network of 20 diaper services and laundries.
So what do the customers of diaper services know? They certainly know that they will receive 90 clean diapers a week for $10.95 (from Baby`s Perfect) or $10.25 (from Cottontails) as opposed to paying almost $12 for 60 disposables. They may also know that diaper services wash dirty diapers in 160-degree water for 75 minutes to sterilize them and add a chemical called a bacteriostat to the wash to retard the growth of bacteria on a diaper, thus reducing the chance of diaper rash.
The customers also know that the diapers will be delivered once a week, on the same day and, usually, to within a half-hour of the appointed time. Almost everyone in the business has a favorite story of how the diaper truck got through when nothing else could. Mogavero remembers working 21 days straight during and after the 1967 blizzard in Chicago. Conley recalls his time in Allentown, Pa., during the Three Mile Island crisis; his trucks made their stops, but house after house was empty because the families had been evacuated.
”Sometimes we get through when the mailman doesn`t,” Conley said. ”But it`s more important for us to get through. Our customers can`t turn the kids off.”
Indeed they can`t. Through the portals of Conley`s giant washing machines pass 125,000 dirty diapers a day. His 9,100 customers require that one million diapers be kept in circulation. The inside of the Baby`s Perfect plant, just off a quiet section of Lincoln Avenue on the Northwest Side, looks like a white desert, with an occasional head popping up between the dunes of clean diapers. Back in a corner are the bags of soiled diapers, which rubber-gloved laundrymen handle without apparent distaste. There is only the slightest tang in the air.
”The bacteriostat holds down the smell,” Conley said. ”But on Monday morning, when the diapers have been sitting in here for the whole weekend, you can get a good shot of ammonia (a byproduct of the break-down of urine). That clears your sinuses out real fast.”
Because diaper services realize their strongest selling point is the service they provide, they are willing to go to lengths practically unimaginable in this time of standardization to satisfy a customer: Witness Conley`s impossible customer. They have gift certificates and prepaid discount plans, special rinses to adjust a diaper`s acidity for sensitive skin and various sizes and types of diaper–they will even deliver disposables. They will supply training pants, diaper hampers and hamper deodorizers.
But the services know they, not the disposables manufacturers, have the uphill fight. Disposables are entrenched, and even a diaper-service mother will use disposables on trips or long visits to grandma`s. And for every study the natural-cloth advocates can produce to prove that cotton diapers cause less diaper rash, the manufacturers of disposables can produce one to show there is no significant difference. True, cotton breathes, but Sidney McHugh, a spokesman for Procter and Gamble, promises a ”new generation” of Pampers with ”breathable leg cuffs.”
On the other hand, there is no getting around the fact that cotton diapers are more versatile than disposables (they can be used for burp cloths and crib liners) and that they hang around the environment for several decades or even centuries.
”The trash problem, the cost factor, lugging the boxes home, we took all that into consideration,” Doetsch said. ”We bought a big box of the newborn size for Evelyn (now 6 months old), but I only used about 10 of them. I don`t know what else we`ll do with them. Evelyn probably will put them on her dolls someday.”
