Breaking Up with My Drycleaner

I swear, this whole thing feels like a Seinfeld episode. I love my dry cleaner, but he's got to go.

Our relationship started about a year ago, shortly after he opened up his new place about a mile from my front door. The cleaner shop had been there for years, maybe since the Paleolithic, and I had been using it since I arrived in Burbank some six months prior to that.

I refused to use the dry cleaner that my fiancee uses, not out of any disgust with their service or prices, but because it happens to be on the other side of the I-5. Traveling to her cleaner requires a trip across the bridge, and an inevitably pointless wait at the corner of Burbank and Victory boulevards. (On a related note, if anyone has any idea WHY that stupid light takes so long to change, please let me know. Really.)

So, to keep my blood pressure down and my happiness up, I stay firmly in the flats. My cleaner's predecessor got my business because of geography, my cleaner - who I shall call "Mike" - kept it because of his generally sunny disposition. But our relationship has soured. At least on my end.

My shirts keep getting holes, tearing in places where they should not, and fading much faster than they ought. Now, some of this may be due to hard use by yours truly, and part of it may simply be bad advice. Cleaners constantly - and Mike is no exception - berate you into dry cleaning your favorite shirts as a way to keep them as long as possible. However, I'm thinking this may have had the opposite effect.

Donna suggested that I perform a scientific experiment: take my dry cleaning to another place for a time and see if my clothes receive the same amount of wear. Of course, this would require abandoning Mike for the next year, which sorta makes me feel like a schmuck. But, then again, they are my clothes, and if I have an inkling that it's Mike's fault, I shouldn't go back.

The whole thing puts an amusing question in my head: do I have to tell him. Do I walk into Mike's shop, sans clothes, and inform him that we have to start seeing other cleaners? Do I do it by phone? Brother, I'd feel like an ass if I just stopped using his shop, but I'd almost feel like ass if I didn't tell him why.

See, Seinfeld episode, LA-style.