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There are no illusions in Ed Fox's shop at Walt Disney World. There are no anima trons, no goofy, grinning characters, no artificial cheer. Ed Fox's shop is where Disney comes clean - the laundry.
There's not much magic to it, just a lot of work: 400 people on duty 365 days a year, two full shifts a day, with a little linen left over for a third shift.
Disney's dirty linen gets done in a nondescript, two-story building the size of a city block. Labeled "Laundry and Dry Cleaning," it has a logo that looks at first like just a group of bubbles, but on reflection resolves itself into a soapy Mickey head.
Inside, the place looks truly un-Disneyesque - industrial, in fact. There is no air conditioning, no one wears a uniform, the staff contains a good measure of immigrants and many of the signs on the walls contain instructions in Spanish.
The machines look vaguely familiar, except for their size. The clothes dryers are the size of dump trucks. The machine that irons and folds 915 queen-sized sheets an hour looks like a printing press. The washers hold 900 pounds of laundry at a time, computers control the mix of detergents.
The laundry uses 400,000 cubic feet of natural gas a day and 350,000 gallons of water. It is one of the biggest facilities in the country.
Every towel, napkin, bed sheet, table cloth, pillow case, bath mat - every piece of linen used in any Disney hotel or restaurant, every uniform or costume used in the Magic Kingdom or Epcot or Pleasure Island - they all come here.
Every sheet in every occupied room is changed every day; every employee gets a freshly dry-cleaned uniform. Designed, as Fox says, for the 1,500 hotel rooms and "one little Magic Kingdom" that existed when Disney first opened in 1971, "we're just bursting at the seams now."
His people clean up after 6,100 hotel rooms and three big parks, plus a couple of smaller ones. When Disney planners talk of new facilities, all Fox sees is more linen and no more capacity.
The operation is full service. Drivers pick up dirty laundry and return clean laundry to 260 locations at Disney on 13 pick-up routes.
The facility is divided roughly in half - laundry on one side, dry-cleaning on the other.
During a holiday week, the facility did 818,000 pounds of laundry. Incoming laundry is dumped onto a conveyor belt, which takes it to a second floor sorting room. It returns to the first-floor washing area through stainless-steel chutes that dump dirty linens directly into washing machines. Eventually, closet-sized carts filled with pristine linens wait to be trucked out.
Dry cleaning is also sorted first, according to color and pattern and the kind of attention it needs. The dry-cleaning ranges from ball gowns and full-dress tuxedos to chefs' hats and emergency medical technician uniforms to Mickey Mouse costumes. Much of it makes its way through the laundry on hangers dangling from elaborate moving conveyors, about 25,000 pieces a day.
All of Disney is at the mercy of the laundry. According to Fox, most hotels, restaurants and parks have no more than a four-day supply of their laundry. To forestall disaster, three maintenance men work full-time each shift.
Last summer, when a machine that provided heat to dry and iron sheets broke down, Fox says, "I just started calling every laundry guy I knew on the phone, and the first one who said yes got all my business." He ended up trucking Disney's sheets to Space Coast Hospital in Rockledge.
Among the secrets revealed amid Disney's dirty laundry is that the sheets you sleep on and towel off with in your suite at the new, luxe Grand Floridian may have last done duty in the most ordinary room at the Contemporary.
At Disney, all linens are created equal.
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