commercial
Retail and shop cleaning
Retail cleaning costs £25 to £60 a visit for a small shop and £100 to £300 for a large store, or £17 to £24 an hour. Nearly all of it happens in the hour before opening, because a shop floor being cleaned while customers are in it reads as a shop that was not ready.
What this covers
What it costs. Retail cleaning costs £25 to £60 a visit for a small shop, £60 to £150 for a mid-size unit and £100 to £300 for a large store. Full cost breakdown.
What the job covers
- Shop floors cleaned before opening
- Entrance glass, frontage and door furniture
- Entrance matting, which holds most of what comes in
- Fitting rooms, tills and counters
- Stockrooms and staff areas, on a longer cycle
What is involved
The entrance is where spending pays back most, and the matting matters more than the glass. Matting at the door holds the grit and water that would otherwise be walked across the whole floor, and a store with the right length of matting stays clean several times longer between visits than one relying on a mop. Matting suppliers put the useful length at three to five metres, long enough to take several footfalls, and it is worth measuring what is there now.
Glass is the part customers judge. Frontage, door glass and fingerprints at handle height are the first thing anybody sees, they need doing far more often than the floor does, and in a busy store that means daily rather than weekly.
The stockroom runs on a different cycle and is the area most easily overlooked. It is not seen by customers, so it slips down the specification, and it is where stock damage, pests and trip hazards accumulate. A monthly slot for it in the contract is what stops that, and it costs very little next to the daily work.
Choosing someone for the job
Ask what time they can be finished by. Everything about this depends on being out before the doors open.
Ask whether the frontage and door glass are daily or weekly. It is the most visible surface in the shop and the easiest to under-specify.
Ask how the stockroom and staff areas are scheduled. Giving them their own slot in the schedule keeps them from slipping behind the shop floor.
Common questions
When is the cleaning done?
Before opening for most shops, and after closing for some. Either way it is outside trading hours, because visible cleaning during trade reads badly and slows the work down.
How often does the frontage need doing?
Daily in a busy high street location, weekly in a quiet one. It carries fingerprints at handle height and road film at street level, and both are noticed before anything else.
Where retail cleaning is listed
Towns with a cleaner on this site who takes it on, and how many.