Within the floor-care industry, a misnomer for a piece of floor-care equipment that should actually just be called a stripper...but I guess it's understandable why they wouldn't want to do that.

Picture a big round brillo pad on a stick. Make it really heavy. Make it spin and trail a cord like a very inconvenient vacuum cleaner, just perfectly designed to turn you into a blue-faced, badly bruised mummy of electrical cord. Oh, and don't forget that it de facto makes the floor underneath it very slippery. Put some half-crocked blue collar workers on it and you have a perfect recipe for some of the most amusing security tapes known to man.

The waxing is generally done with mops, because if you tried to wax with a stripper your floor would have spirals in it, like crop circles, only stickier.

A "stripper" or "stripper-waxer" is not to be confused with a "buffer" or "high-speed buffer", which looks similar but has a different motor, uses different pads and is less heavy (so that it doesn't gouge up the wax). A buffer is also easier to use and thus not as funny to watch someone using. Of course, the alternate definitions of this term are many...but none of the stripper-waxers I know in real life would appreciate being mentioned here.

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