Shoe covers have many applications in many different industries. You will find them in use in manufacturing, real estate, and medical facilities. Laboratories, too. Even newly finished construction sides.
As such, many different types of shoe covers have been introduced to meet a variety of needs. Here is a brief guide to the various types of shoe covers to help you go about selecting the best type for your use case.
Disposable Shoe Covers
- Con: Wasteful, unreliable (prone to tears and rips)
- Pro: Inexpensive, unreliable (prone to tears and rips)
Reusable Shoe Covers
Reusable shoe covers, on the other hand, are good for multiple uses. You might find these in places such as medical facilities, where visitors will be spending longer period or time and returning in the future. Individual consumers can use reusable shoe covers as well to prevent shoe damage during rain and snow season. These usually require washing in between uses.
- Pro: Inexpensive, more durable, longer lasting
- Con: Require manual application, need washing, come in disorganized boxes
Professional-grade/Specialized Shoe Covers
- Pro: Help facilities avoid costly contamination, pollutants, and static
- Con: More expensive
Tips for Choosing the Right Shoe Cover
How you choose the right shoe covers will depend, or course, on your use case. In a clean room, for example, there might be certain mandated standards for shoe covers, such as anti-slip or chemically resistant. Many manufacturing facilities will require anti-static shoe covers to meet compliance standards.
As you go about selecting shoe covers, here are a few factors to consider:
- Budget
- Use case
- Convenience
- Cleanliness standards
- Volume of foot traffic
One final factor to consider is what we like to call “time cost.” This is one of the main disadvantages of traditional shoe covers, no matter which variety: they require visitors to apply the shoe covers themselves. Not only is this inconvenient, it is time consuming.
That’s why we recommend an automatic shoe cover machine to automate this process. From the operational perspective, this makes it easy to manage shoe covers, only requiring manual intervention when the shoe cover roll needs to be replaced. From the visitor’s perspective, an automatic shoe cover dispenser provides a simple, low-effort, non-disruptive process for applying shoe covers. Over time, especially in high-volume facilities, the “time cost” savings can be considerable.
