During my years in Burbank, working for Paradise, I learned more about the commercial floor-mat market than I ever dreamed possible. Certainly, it was more than I wanted to know. Why am I mentioning it now? I saw the guy changing out the floor mats here at LBridge hagwon — replacing the dirty ones with clean ones. These are "logo mats" — they have the hagwon's name on them (maybe sometime I'll sneak a picture and post it). And I felt this weird kinship with the man rolling out the mats and lugging the dirty ones to the elevator.
"I've done that," I thought. Well, I wasn't the delivery guy. I was a "corporate office" guy, doing database things. I analyzed customer buying patterns across different product lines, and helped tell the marketers who they should target for their next promotion, or worked out more cost-effective ways to enforce large corporate contracts with respect to our unruly branch service locations. But all of us central office types had gone on the occasional "route ride," where you accompany the delivery guys as they go out and deliver the uniforms, mats and other laundered paraphernalia to the customers. I'm not sure if LBridge rents these mats, or if they own them and pay a laundry service to clean them. I have no idea if the company cleaning them operates giant computerized plants all over Korea or is a mom and pop business that spreads them out on concrete somewhere and hoses them down.
But I spent way too much time thinking about it. Speculating about the secret lives of our hagwon's floor mats. Or maybe it's not bad to spend time thinking about it. Mostly, most people never think about things like the vast number of rubberized floor mats that exist in businesses all over the world: how they get there, who owns them, what they're made of, how much they cost, who cleans them. I remember when I worked at the Casa in Mexico City, watching the maids taking them into the courtyard and having to hose them off and scrub them. Unpleasant business. And I had to do that with floor mats myself, when I worked at that 7-11 store in Boston, that summer. Where were the rental and laundry guys, then?
And… there are wider cultural questions. What's the cumulative carbon footprint of all rubberized floor mats, in all the world? I mean, there's manufacturing issues, the wasted water and toxic chemicals involved in cleaning them, and disposal issues, too. Are they really necessary? Are there alternatives? What are those alternatives? Would western civilization be the same, without them? Would we all be languishing in hospitals with fractures acquired from slipping on slippery floors? Would retail business models collapse due to a lack of repeat business, because there were no snazzy floor mats establishing brand identity in the entryways?
Oh… that gets deep.