Dry Cleaners’ Victory in Pants Lawsuit Still Comes With a Loss
From the Washington Post, I had not heard this, this is just fucked up.
Sphere: Related ContentEven on the day they beat Roy Pearson in the $54 million pants lawsuit, Soo and Jin Chung looked as if they had taken blows to the gut.Yes, after a two-year ordeal that turned a pair of gray trousers into a global symbol of how easy it is to hijack the U.S. legal system, a D.C. Superior Court judge
ruled that the owners of Custom Cleaners had not abused their customer in any way.
And yes, an outraged public embraced the couple and donated more than $100,000 to cover their legal bills.
But that’s not the end of the story. Bowing to emotional and financial burdens created by the legal battle over a $10.50 alteration, Custom Cleaners has gone out of business. The Chungs announced yesterday that they have sold their shop on Bladensburg Road NE, let their employees go and are down to one store, Happy Cleaners on Seventh Street NW, across from the Washington Convention Center in Shaw.
I found Soo Chung there yesterday, sweeping the floor. She looked a bit more at ease, but the strain of two years of strangulation by lawsuit was evident as she wrung her hands and furrowed her brow at the mention of Pearson. But when the conversation turned to the couple’s return to Happy Cleaners, she brightened.
“This is our first store, first job,” she told me. “When we came to America in 1992, we worked here. Good job. Good store.”
“They were just tired of the whole ordeal,” said the Chungs’ daughter-in-law Soo Choi. “A lot of people view this comically because the case is so outrageous, but my mother-in-law has gone down four dress sizes from this whole ordeal. They just want to put this in their past.”
The Chungs, bewildered that one vindictive customer could cause a small business so much grief, found it hard to go back to the shop in Fort Lincoln each day. And the lawsuit proved to be a big drag on revenue at Custom Cleaners.
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