Back when I went off to college, in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I learned the basics of doing my own laundry. White, cotton, non-permanent-press items, viz., sheets, towels, and underwear, get washed hot and dried hot; colors get warm wash / cold rinse; and permanent press gets the gentle dryer cycle; so has it been since time immemorial.
And I've followed the same rules for lo these many years, modulo the special shuffling to deal with the special case of white permanent-press shirts (which I hardly ever wear anymore), and all was well.
Except: the past couple of years, I've been having to replace the occasional fitted sheet not because it had holes worn through it, as had been the normal indication that it was time for a new one, but because it had shrunk to the point that it no longer fit over the mattress.
So: how it is that for (mumble) years, I was washing the sheets hot and drying them hot, and the fitted sheets never shrank, and yet lately the fitted sheets have been shrinking a little every week, so that in the space of half a year one will go from a loose fit to a force fit?
Maybe I need to buy the next one (real soon now) from a more upscale source? The current one is from Target; the previous few, from Bed Bath and Beyond; before that (before, come to think of it, the shrinkage issue) I bought such things at Strouds, which seems to have gone entirely out of business (ah, back in 2003)... but there's a Facebook page for it???
Hmph. Maybe I should just shop on Amazon, where the reviews are.
Update: had a preliminary look at Amazon. As usual, the organization of the site leaves something to be desired. Like, the ability to narrow a search by subcategory, in this case "fitted sheet" vs. "sheet set". Why aren't more on-line stores better organized? Digi-Key and Newegg have decent search-narrowing capability... but, that takes specialist labor to maintain, and maybe isn't terribly practical in the multi-seller bazaar format.
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