Carpet Cleaning Industry Potential Ever since the inception of Bane-Clene® in 1962, there have been those who said that the carpet cleaning industry is short term. They also predicted it would get saturated (no pun intended) and will dry up. They have also said that too much competition will ruin the industry. Now they are saying that increased use of hard surface flooring and area rugs will weaken the industry. In 1962, there were about 6000 carpet cleaners in the country. Today there are more that 40000 carpet cleaning firms. This does not include building maintenance contractors, in-house operators and part timers. It has been estimated that more than 1,000,000 people are employed in our industry. In 1962, the carpet industry produced approximately 3000 million square yards of carpet. For the last several years there have been over 2 billion square yards of carpet manufactured annually in the USA. With the average life of carpet around eight years, it is estimated that there are more than 11 billion square yards of carpet waiting to be cleaned. That is more than 99 billion square feet. It has also been estimated that over a billion square feet of carpet is cleaned every year by a Bane-Clene® System operator. So that leaves a potential market of more than 98 billion square feet. That's obviously a lot of carpet. If you want to visualize a billion square yards of carpeting try this: it would make a twelve foot wide path around the world nearly six times. Since we are only actually cleaning a small portion of the potential, we have plenty of room to grow. We have not even begun to scratch the surface. Again, no pun intended. Thank you for reading Bane’s Blog®. Please read the latest issue of the Clene-Times® at https://www.baneclene.com/publications/. Please visit our new and improved web site at https://www.baneclene.com. The Bane-Clene® Team.