Louie’s Cleaner

Cheap place, good service recommend it i have been going here for a while now and i can say that i have never had any real trouble.

This probably is the best dry cleaners in the area, but they’re not perfect. To best understand this concept, let’s talk about my commute.
I can theoretically take any number of Caltrains* between the San Mateo/​Hillsdale area and SF on any given morning between 8 and 9am. However, there’s only _​one_​train that matches up with an open dry cleaner that’s on the walking path to my train and that’s Louie’s.
So on a random Tuesday morning I decided to drop off my shirts (less than $ 2 for wash/​press, about $ 5 for dry clean) and then walk to the train. The other cleaners (Borel Square, Eddie’s) are either not open at 7:45am (Eddie’s) or much further from the train (Borel) and therefore not effective.
Last time I had been at Louie’s to pick up shirts I had noticed the hours our front said 7:30am-7pm*** and technically I was correct. Except those hours referred to Monday — and this was Tuesday. On Tuesdays they don’t open until 9am.
Remember this conversation about the train and how I can take numerous options? The one closest to Louie’s (Hayward Park) only comes once and hour in the morning so I had to walk back to Borel Square, drop the shirts off, go home, get my bike, bike to Hillsdale, be bumped from that train, and then bike to San Mateo in order to get to work when if they had normal hours this wouldn’t have been a problem.
They have a similar issue to all of the other cleaners in that they will push out the return dates as far as possible; I just dropped off shirts on a Monday morning that they initially suggested would be ready on Friday afternoon. Does it really take that long to wash and press shirts here? It’s a fairly standard response from a lot of places.
I talked them back down to Thursday and that’s fine, and they also have a rapid turnaround for a fee and get shirts back to you same day. I also had some alterations done here (that I marked myself) and those were fine.
Because of prices, probably the best in the area.
* — assuming of course that they are on time, not too crowded for me to get on**, and haven’t decided to randomly stop letting passengers through the gate.
** — bicycle roulette (the idea of whether or not you can get on a train with a bicycle is whole other review).
*** — sadly the moose out front didn’t tell me.