# Cintas *The economics of density* --- A Cintas van pulls up outside a mid-sized factory every week. It drops off clean uniforms, swaps the floor mats, restocks the restroom supplies, refills the first-aid cabinet, and checks the fire extinguishers on the way out. There are two ways to make a delivery route more valuable: 1. **More stops per route.** Reducing the time between stops spreads the fixed cost of the van and driver over more customers. 2. **More sales per stop.** Getting a van and a person to the door is the expensive bit. Once one service has paid for the visit, everything else loaded onto it is mostly margin. Put the two together at scale and they compound. Every extra customer and every extra service adds to the density of the base, and the lower unit cost can go back into keener prices or new products in a way a smaller rival can't match. It is why Cintas, in a so-called 'commodity' industry, earns an operating margin around 23% while its nearest rival UniFirst earns closer to 8%. Same trucks, same garments. The difference is that Cintas is denser in more markets, so each stop costs less to serve, and it sells a broader, higher-margin mix down the same visit, where UniFirst leans on lower-margin uniform rental. --- Customer density is local. It is won road by road, not nationally. On a given road, whoever has the most customers makes the most stops per mile, so they can charge a fair price and still earn more per stop than a thinner rival. They win the next account and get denser still. Cintas has run that playbook longest and widest - about 12,100 delivery routes out to more than a million customers - and no rival is close. You might expect twice the customers on a route to halve the driving between them. It doesn't work like that. There's an old result, the travelling salesman problem, that says the distance to cover a set of stops grows with the square root of how many there are. So the driving per stop falls with the square root of density: double the customers and it drops by about a third. A competitor with half your density drives roughly forty percent further to every door, and can't close that by trying harder. M&A can speed this up. Cintas paid roughly $2.2 billion for competitor G&K Services in 2017. G&K customers sat on roads Cintas trucks already drove, so laying one network over the other pulled the stops closer together. The deal brought in more than 170,000 customers. In 2026 Cintas agreed terms to do it again, this time for UniFirst itself. Cintas buys direct rivals and folds their stops into its routes. That is the reverse of a [[Bergman & Beving|decentralised acquirer]], which buys businesses in unrelated fields and leaves them to run themselves. --- The business isn't bulletproof - rentals are billed per uniformed worker, so when a downturn thins headcount, the billings fall with it. But selling more services per stop improves the economics, and it makes the customer harder to lose - Cintas holds on to more than nine in ten of its customers each year. A customer taking uniforms, mats, first aid, restroom supplies and fire protection off one weekly visit has five things to unpick before it can leave. That is [[Complements|complements]] in a physical business: services that ride the same van are cheaper to sell and harder to walk away from. --- Richard Farmer, who built the company, used to say that corporate culture, more than anything, separated greatness from mediocrity. It sounds like a platitude until you see what it buys at Cintas: a person at the same door every week, doing a dull job well enough that nobody thinks to switch.