Future Housecleaner

The classic housecleaner is a person with mops and dusters and rags and spray bottles and vacuum cleaners. Except for the vacuum cleaners, the job has been the same for hundreds of years. Folks cleaned their own houses or hired folks to do the cleaning, but the tools and techniques have stayed the same from time immemorial.

Progress must have arrived by now. Right?

Robot vacuum cleaners, even robot moppers, have been roaming our homes for a few years now. The newest ones can even empty their hoppers.

Rags have undergone significant improvements, too. Microfiber rags leave no lint or streaks. Nonwoven paper products have replaced old towels and t-shirts.

Dusters have gone high tech with chemically infused treatments to collect and trap dust better than ever.

Air conditioning systems have been improved with electrostatic air filtration and UV light systems to reduce dust, allergens and pollutants. Modern windows let in less dust, too.

There are self-cleaning ovens and no-frost refrigerators.

What a great time to be alive!

It is also still a great time to be a housecleaner.

Do the robot vacuums and moppers get under furniture and into corners? Do the moppers need someone to load and unload them?

Technology reduces the dust load, probably, but how do bookshelves, curio shelves, tabletops, and baseboards get dusted?

Better dusters don’t operate themselves. And maybe old towels and t-shirts produced less waste than all the paper towels we use now.

Self-cleaning ovens don’t clean up all the ash that the self-cleaning process creates.

Not to mention toilets, tubs and showers that have no robots to clean them.

Actually, cleaning expectations have probably been raised by all the technology we have now. Folks want cleaner houses. Housecleaners have more tools to satisfy that expectation. But there is no replacement for the person who dusts and vacuums and mops and cleans.

The future of housecleaning is …… housecleaners!