Bensinger’s Fine Cleaners

I’m a professional that doesn’t have the time to wash and press my own shirts during a typical week. Well, apparently neither does Bensinger’s.
The shirts I get back from them usually need to be repressed or fixed up once I get them back, or even after I ask them to be re-​pressed. They often have little pieces of lint stuck on them. I made the mistake of giving them a tie with a subtle stain on it. Now the tie has deeply imprinted lines from an improper press that I can’t get rid of. They are more obvious than the stain was!
Did I mention their prices are higher than average?!
Steer clear!

Prior to my sister’s wedding I took both her wedding veil and my bridesmaid dress to Bensigers on Union to be steamed. There were no prices listed in the store so I inquired before leaving my items the prices. The clerk told me that the dress would be $ 13.99 but she didn’t know the price for the veil. So she called, spoke to someone and they said $ 25.99. That seems extraordinary for a steaming but it was Monday and the wedding was on Saturday so I sucked it up. I was told definitively that the items would be ready on Wednesday.
On Wednesday at 6pm I returned to pick up my items. After 10 minutes of the clerk telling me that the computer didn’t show the items at the store, she finally located the bridesmaid dress. But the veil was nowhere to be found. I was baffled! How can I drop off two (valuable) items together and they get separated when they were both receiving the SAME treatment!!!
Finally, the clerk calls the store on Poplar and Perkins and finds that the veil is there and tells ME that I can go there and pick it up, but I have to get there by 6:30pm. That was utterly unacceptable. I asked her to have it brought to the store where I left it. She says it wouldn’t get there before 6PM on the following day. Mind you, good customer service would dictate that since they made the mistake they would accommodate the error as quickly as possible. That was not a priority. I asked if I would still have to pay for the service and she said «of course!» Further, she asked «well is the wedding on Friday or something, why does it matter?» Well it mattered because, I was told it’d be ready (at the Union location) on Wednesday, and not only was it not ready, it wasn’t even in the store! I directed the clerk to leave the veil at the Poplar location and I would pick it up myself the next day because I didn’t trust that they would have it in the right place.
On Thursday, I went across town to the Poplar location. Guess what? The veil wasn’t there either. The same clerk, with little fanfare says, «oh it was there all day, they must have taken it back to the plant.» As the steam began to rise from my scalp, another clerk finally got some sense about her and decided to call their van driver, found that he had taken the veil for some unknown reason and was on his way to take it somewhere else. She after some prodding convinced him to return the veil to the store and i FINALLY received it. And they made no accommodations on price to boot.
This was the most stressful experience I’ve ever had with a cleaners. And it wasn’t like it was a dress or suit for work. This was a wedding veil! I will never patronize Bensingers again and I will encourage my friends and colleagues to take anything of value to another cleaners where even if they get it wrong, will acknowledge the wrong and try to make it right. I did not get that service here.

I heard that this was one of the better dry cleaners in Memphis, which doesn’t speak well for the city of Memphis.
I show up at the specified date and time to pick up my clothes.
I spend several minutes while the woman behind the counter fishes around on the rack looking for the clothes that belong to the man in line ahead of me. I watch her tell him that only some of his clothes have made it back, even though they are all supposed to be there. She tells him to come back tomorrow for the rest of his clothes.
Finally it is my turn. The woman goes back to the rack (a rolling cart in the middle of the room) to look for my clothes. The rack is tightly jammed with so many hangers that you can’t pull one out without causing others to come out as well. Doesn’t this defeat the point of having your clothes pressed, when they’re smashed together for hours before being picked up? Every other dry cleaners I have ever seen has one of those train-​like systems where the hangers are evenly spaced and they press a button to bring yours around to the front. Not this place, apparently. Just a rolling rack in the middle of the floor, thrift-​store style, with all of the clothes that «came back from the plant» that day.
She finally finds my suit and, after trying to extricate it from the massive sandwich of dry cleaning on the too-​small rack, inadvertently drops it on the floor in a heap. She picks it right back up as if nothing has happened and brings it to the front.
She goes back to the rack and eventually locates 3 of the 5 pairs of pants that I had dropped off. At this point she suggests that if I want to, I can go back and look for my other 2 pairs of pants, while she helps the next customer, because she is unable to find them.
That’s right, at Bensinger’s, apparently it is the customer’s job to find their clothes, if they are even there at all!
I walk around behind the counter and try to look through the clothes smashed together on the rack — a difficult task when you can only see the side of each item because of the complete lack of space to slide them apart. I too am unable to locate my other pants.
At this point the woman behind the counter tells me that my clothes probably just didn’t make it back from the plant today. She says this is a common problem at Bensinger’s — «I don’t know why they tell y’all it will be ready so fast, it’s bad for business when people come in here and their clothes aren’t back yet. They should just add on another day.» If this is a common problem, why hasn’t it been fixed yet?
She tells me to come back tomorrow for my remaining pairs of pants. There goes another half hour of my life to drive there, wait, and drive back.
Other than dropping my suit in a heap and sandwiching my clothes on the rack, they seem to have done an adequate job on the dry cleaning I got back today, which is the only reason I am giving 2 stars rather than 1.
I will be looking for another dry cleaners and you should too.

I’ve been going to this Bensinger’s for about two years now, and I’m nothing short of happy. It’s a little on the pricey side compared to other cleaners, but everything’s always been well-​done and on-​time. I like that they store your phone number along with all of your preferences in their system so that I don’t have to remind them that I don’t like starch on my shirts every time I drop them off. I’ve brought some pretty haggard stuff into here (a white shirt that I wore on a long 95-​degree day in Washington, D.C. and then stuffed into a carry-​on for my flight back to Memphis, for instance) and thought, «man, there’s no way they’re going to be able to resurrect this.» Everything’s always been returned to me as good as new. I had to dock a star for the relatively high prices, but you get what you pay for here.