Complaint Review: Allways Clean company of Morro Bay California - Morro Bay California

The City of San Luis Obispo has a cleaning contract with Allways Clean and we would like to comment on their services also. If you go over the City of San Luis Obispo website, the vendors name Allways Clean is open to view on cleaning the City bathrooms and states the requirements of the duties seven days  a week. On a grade report on cleaning, Allways Clean deserves a F- letter grade on the way they do their service to the City, heres why.
  
Our 2 cents in this report we viewed AWC when they took an account with the City of San Luis Obispo back in October 2009 on a cleaning bid to service the City public restrooms for $6500.00 a month - which is about 13 bathrooms for cleaning services for 7 days week which they still have the service contract. If you do the math, thats $209.00 per night which is before taxes. Now to understand how that works is its very simple; break it down to 4 hours per evening (thats their average time), thats including the driving time from bathroom to bathroom, youve got 240 minutes (4hrs) so if you have time to drive, you have about 18 minutes for each cleaning. We could not imagine them cleaning any longer than 5 hours a night so we verified their time was 4 hours as recorded. To verify this we took a stopwatch and timed Always Clean on their cleaning time for a regular evening to see how Always Clean performed their duties for the City. Their schedule as it goes is all City bathrooms are locked at 8pm so that is when the cleaning begins. Between one bathroom location to another the average time was 10 to 12 minutes per location and about 5 to 8 minutes to drive to the next restroom location.  When you take the time from when they drive up, then pull their stuff out of their car and start cleaning theyre off again came to about 18 minutes per cleaning per location; thats 10 minutes there and they are gone. In the morning after doors are unlocked by the City maintenance you can sample the work after no one has used the bathrooms prior to the cleaning service from Allways Clean. First hand you will notice no smell of any cleaning agents, many finger prints still present, urine spots still on the floors and half cleaned toilets; the only thing that looked clean, is they change the bag liners. Sampling the bathrooms you have no doubt that their work is sloppy and not following their cleaning contract. The smell of heavy odor on the Cities public bathrooms reflects the poor cleaning that is done each evening with the rush cleaning method by Always Clean; which appears to be the same 4 hour formula since December 2009.
 
You can look at the walls as they do not get wiped down at all and the heavy odor in these bathrooms are not being treated probably as simple steps that could eliminate the problem but we saw no professionalism in the quality of work when viewing these City restrooms one after another.
 
We noticed City bathroom after bathroom there is a great deal of urine left under toilets untouched, rings left in toilet bowls, sticky door handles, dirty light switches and the list goes on. You can even notice they never dust above ceilings or clean ceiling vents or wipe restroom panels down; cobwebs are everywhere also too. I think personally every one of the 13 City bathrooms needs about 8 hours of a full cleaning each about every 4 months but it is my guess none of them have ever been fully cleaned in a longtime and it shows. You can take a black light and see the urine residue everywhere and thats not good for OSHA or the City for public use, it becomes a City liability if someone files a report on the cleanliness if someone gets ill or something similar. When you have the homeless taking showers over bathroom sinks, it is definitely not a good idea to dash the cleaning service.
 
We learned that the prior cleaning company before 2009 City contract was run by Service Master which apparently they were doing the same job for $7500.00 a month. The difference between Service Master and Allways Clean was, Service Master used one commercial vehicle but they were letting their vehicle run on idle while cleaning the bathrooms, so they were no better either. Same mop and same dash cleaning method rushing the work to meet a profit in 4 hours.
 
There is really no question the City of San Luis Obispo was looking for the lowest bid as well so that kind of tells you who's driving the price down. We viewed on a another report on AWC that made their complaint was saying Allways Clean is preforming by competing with the lowest bids the City should have realized that the price normally always affects the service you pay for. It is my view that taxpayers should deserve better than contracting run down questionable cleaning services the City contracted, public restrooms should be professionally cleaned every day. It also is obvious the City wasnt one bit concerned with any cleaning company having any insurance benefits for employees, its kind of the norm on these cleaning companies to bid low and find ways to make a profit with what we call the "trash and dash" cleaning method which also doesnt surprise me that no one has any medical benefits either.
 
Looking at the service on the City restrooms bid contract, the appropriate bid should have been $15,000.00 a month, anything less is cutting business too short to do the work. Why the city choose a bid of $6500.00 when the previous cleaning company bid was $7500.00 a month, it is obviously they want to save money but really the City would been better off hiring their own staff to do the work in my view. Yes the City would have to pay employee 401ks, health insurance, use city commercial vehicles and work on an hourly than being pressed for time to profit. I think personally if people are going to get less than $9.00 or $10.00 they should at least pay their health insurance on the other report said also, they weren't paying their medical insurance is a very valid point. If these people get sick on the job whose going foot their medical bill if they have nothing? I might address this to the City that contracts should require vendors to cover employee health benefits and should reject any contract without their ideals to the public will. Especially the environment of dirty places under an employer who can catch any type illness should be insured medical is a valid point in my view. It really says something on a cleaning company can do the same job for even less than half the price. Which $6500.00 a month to me is a cheap shot in cleaning 13 restrooms, to 13 locations, 7 days a week. It is pretty disgusting.
 
I happened to have noticed and read the website owned by allwayscorp.com and noticed they are not being straight forward with their business ethics but really telling us some misleading information on what they say they do but really they dont.
 
allwayscorp.com website says:
We are committed to developing, supporting, and empowering our people to maintain the highest of standards. By developing excellent people we provide excellent service.
According to the SLO City cleaning vendor contact, it appears this to be a big lie. Excellent service should provide clean commercial vehicles and should not be pressed for time to cleaning methods. Cleaning is not based on how face you can get it done but by performing to the contract from each visit as required for the customer and that Allways clean fails to perform from our view.
 
Professional Office Cleaning We provide detailed dusting and wiping for clients that need to have a complete dust free and professional environment.
I strongly doubt professional cleaning if pricing jobs that dont meet cleaning standards but are in for profits avoiding quality but rushing cleaning jobs such as the City Restrooms. I would be eager to know what their clients have to say about their work but this statement is another lie.
 
Medical Cleaning The fastest growing element of our company is our medical cleaning division. Our staff is thoroughly trained in blood-borne pathogens. One of our primary areas of focus is the reduction of cross contamination. We are consistently updating our procedures for best practices. At All Ways Clean we encompass JCAHO and OSHA standards when creating our policies and procedures.
State law requires wearing OSHA certified gloves for cleaning purposes as we never noticed any of Allways clean employees wearing any gloves, face masks, goggles or protected clothing. I doubt that this to be true when you see cleaning vehicles that are not equipped with anything that appears to be JCAHO compliant. After seeing mops that looked like mud mops and cleaning kits that looked like dollar store kits, this is most definitely a big lie.
 
My conclusion is on Allways clean company is that they are one big fraud on their services on what they do and what they do probably to convince their customers as like with the City of San Luis Obispo to hire them. If you write a contract and if youre going to tell your customer that youre going to do with what you say and you dont, youre stealing from the customer. Thats fraud.
 
With the City as an example, how many of the customers of Allways clean or were Allways clean customers to say what they have to say. I would love to hear the stories as what we witnessed on our side with the City bathrooms.