Barbershop Blues

Why barbershops should not take reservations

The history of my adult life seeking haircuts goes something like this: For three years, I get my thrice-annual haircut at a fancy salon, paying $40 or so (adjust for deflation as we go back in time), plus tip, to have my hair shampooed and cut by a “stylist.” Then one day I think to myself, “I really can’t afford this. I could get the same haircut for half as much at a barber.” Then I go to a barber for three years, until one day maybe I get a bad haircut, or else I have an important event coming up and I want to pay a little bit extra to maybe look a teensy bit better, and so then I switch back to the salon. If it’s the same salon, and the same stylist, and she (usually she) remembers me, I feel guilty and have to explain my absence. So I mutter something about “a lot of travel” or “sabbatical,” and hope she thinks I’ve been gone only a year, not three, and hope she buys my b.s. story. (I recognize that there’s an element of self-flattery here; she doesn’t care where I’ve been or how long I have been gone. Life proceeds without me.)

But there’s something else going on. I like the barbershop. I like the salon, too, for different reasons: the expensive smells, the hair-washing, the chit-chat among the stylists in adjoining chairs. But when I’ve been to the salon for a couple years, I begin to miss the barber.

And one of the things I miss about the barber is the crowd of people waiting to get their hair cut. At the barber I go to, on a busy afternoon, you could count on between two and six people queueing up for a haircut from one of the two (sometimes three) barbers. Some of us were reading newspapers or magazines, some of us staring at phones. Parents were trying to calm children. Regulars were kibbitzing with their favorite barber, even as the barber was clipping away on someone else’s head. Sometimes, I knew one of the other people waiting, and we caught up.