On the desk today · Cintas Corporation
You never own the uniform. You rent it. And every week, the truck comes back.
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$1 quadrillion would be enough to send a check for $2.8 million to every man, woman, and child in America.
That's how big this opportunity is.
And you could claim a stake today…
Before the company goes public…
Starting with just $500.
The Truck That
Comes Back Every Week
Dick Farmer grew up sorting dirty rags. His grandfather — a former circus performer everyone called "Doc" — had started a small laundry in Cincinnati in 1929, collecting oil-soaked rags from factories, washing them, and selling them back. It was Depression-era recycling. Dick worked the business through childhood and college. After graduating from Miami University in 1956 and serving in the Marines, he came home and told his father he wanted out. "I had handled dirty rags all of my life," he said years later. "I didn't want anything to do with that." His father's reply was unexpected. He handed Dick the keys. "You run this place."
I thought about Farmer last week at a restaurant. The server wore a crisp button-down with a small logo stitched above the pocket. The hostess had the same one. So did the busboy. I looked down at the cuff — no tag, no brand label, just a tiny embroidered name. Someone had delivered those uniforms. Someone was going to pick them up on Friday, wash them, press them, and bring them back on Monday. That someone is Cintas.
Most people think of Cintas as a laundry company. It's not. It's a subscription business — one of the oldest and stickiest in America. You don't buy uniforms from Cintas. You rent them. Every week, a Cintas truck pulls up to your loading dock, drops off clean uniforms, picks up the dirty ones, and leaves. The customer never owns the garment. They pay for the service — per uniform, per week, automatically.
The company traces back to that 1929 Cincinnati laundry. Dick Farmer took over in 1959 and transformed it. He developed a cotton/polyester blend in 1966 that made uniforms last longer. He created Satellite Corp. in 1968 to expand nationally. In 1973, Satellite acquired the family business and became Cintas. He took it public in 1983. By the time he stepped down as CEO in 1995, revenue had passed $1 billion. Today, Todd Schneider runs the operation from Mason, Ohio.
The numbers tell you what the truck route doesn't. In fiscal 2025, Cintas reported $10.34 billion in revenue — up nearly 8% from the year before. Operating income hit $2.36 billion. The operating margin reached 22.8% — an all-time high. Operating cash flow came in at $2.17 billion. This is a company that launders uniforms and floor mats, stocks first-aid kits, and inspects fire extinguishers — and turns that into more than $2 billion in cash. Every year. Like clockwork.
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Forty-two consecutive years of dividend increases. That streak stretches back to 1983 — the year Cintas went public. It has raised its dividend every year since. Through recessions, through the dot-com crash, through 2008, through a pandemic. The truck keeps showing up. The customer keeps paying. The dividend keeps rising.
The pricing power hides in the invoice. Cintas charges per uniform, per mat, per first-aid refill — small amounts on a seven-day cycle. A restaurant paying $200 a week for uniform service barely notices a 4% annual increase. It's $8. That's less than a single lunch ticket. And what's the alternative — set up your own laundry room, buy your own uniforms, hire someone to track and wash them? No one does that. The price goes up every year. Customers pay anyway.
I keep coming back to Farmer's line about the keys. He was 23 years old. He didn't want the job. His father gave it to him anyway. And then he did something no one in the rag-washing business had done before — he built a brand around a service no customer ever thinks about. He used to say, "Corporate culture is the single most important distinguishing factor between greatness and mediocrity. It is the major reason Cintas is different from competitors. It is our ultimate competitive advantage." He meant it. Today, Cintas serves more than one million customers. The largest competitor, UniFirst, had $2.4 billion in revenue — and Cintas just agreed to acquire it in March 2026 for $5.5 billion. The gap between number one and number two wasn't close. Now there won't be a number two.
The flywheel works through cross-selling. A customer that starts with uniform rental adds floor mats. Then restroom supplies. Then first-aid kits. Then fire extinguisher inspections. Then safety training. Each service rides the same truck, the same route, the same visit every seven days. Revenue per stop goes up. The cost of the stop barely changes. Cintas doesn't need new customers to grow. It needs the truck to carry one more box.
WHY THIS WORKS
Rental, not sale. The customer never owns the uniform. That means recurring revenue every seven days, automatic replacement, and no reason to shop around. Canceling means finding — and funding — your own laundry.
Route density compounds. Every new customer on an existing route costs almost nothing to serve. The truck is already driving past. Density is the margin.
Cross-sell on the same truck. Uniforms, mats, first aid, fire protection, restroom supplies — each service adds revenue without adding a route. Revenue per stop grows while cost per stop stays flat.
Invisible price increases. Small per-visit charges mean annual hikes are measured in single-digit dollars. No one switches laundry providers to save $8 a week. The inertia is the moat.
What most people miss: Cintas started in 1929 as a business that washed dirty rags during the Depression. The founder was a former circus performer. His grandson didn't want the job — but took the keys anyway at 23 and turned a Cincinnati laundry route into a $10 billion subscription machine that has raised its dividend for 42 straight years. The rags are gone. The route never stopped.
