The Laundry Wars of Tacoma
A bitter legal battle breaks out as former employees poach customers from their old firm.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A suit has been filed in Superior Court by George E. MacMartin and Margaret MacMartin of the Standard Steam Laundry against George V. Stevens and Edith Moon, who have recently leased the Cascade Steam Laundry. According to the allegations, the defendants were until recently connected with the Standard laundry. When they sold their interest and left, they went into business for themselves, and it is alleged that they used their knowledge of the Standard laundry's customer list to make a systematic campaign to steal business. The MacMartins further allege that the defendants have hired George Neff, a driver for the Standard laundry, to help ruin their business. Neff had a valuable downtown route and was supposed to train a new driver, but instead, he has been soliciting his former clients for the Cascade laundry. The plaintiffs claim this is a systematic effort to ruin their business; it is one of the first cases of this kind to come up in Pierce County courts.
“The plaintiffs claim that this is a systematic effort to ruin their business. The case is a peculiar one and one of the first of the kind to come up in the Pierce county courts.”
This early 20th-century litigation over 'non-compete' practices and poaching client lists feels remarkably like modern disputes over intellectual property and gig-economy labor poaching. Tacoma's business landscape remains just as competitive today, though the venues have shifted from physical laundry routes to digital ones.
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