The Barbershop Conspiracy

A little background:

I live in a small town with the approximate population of 43, 000. In the streets of this small town, where the corporate logos are gathering in a menacing fashion as if they had seen The Birds and really liked that bit with the climbing frame, we have an astonishing/horrifying total of 38 hairdressers. One of them is mobile, which is a concept I'm still struggling with: If you are incapable of walking, hopping or rolling to your nearest barbers, who's going to give a flying crap what your hair looks like? Observers are more likely to be questioning the poo all over your trousers than whether or not you should have gone for that bob-cut.

Or is the concept of the mobile hairdresser that they don't start moving until after you've sat down? At which point the cackling hairdresser nods to the driver, some grinning devil with blinding teeth, who puts pedal to metal and hurtles down swerving roads, your swivel chair swivelling accordingly, and all you can do is scream as your locks are lopped off and the silver scissors flash into view in the corner of your eye. Possibly,  into the corner of your eye. There may be people out there who live for this kind of thrill, I don't know.

But I digress.

38 hairdressers. 43, 000 people. Now, I'm going to take you through some maths here, but bear with me.

Of those 43, 000 people, around 5% will be too young to be going to get a haircut. We're talking babies. I'm probably being generous with the figure here, but I can't seem to go out for a simple coffee without tripping over a pram and spilling scalding hot liquid on their horrid little lobster-faces.

Old people who have forgotten they have hair accounts for another 5%.

Male pattern baldness affects at least 14% of the population of this fine town. Female pattern baldness is strangely arousing so I'm going to give it 16%.

Vagrants and lunatics easily account for another 10%. Of course, the vagrants may occasionally get their beards cut so they can find that lost lettuce leaf from the MacDonalds they scavanged out of a bin three weeks ago, but I'm not going to let that count. Oh, and the lunatics may take their lettuce to get cut but they would go to a MacDonalds to do it after a lengthy argument with a bin. Again, that doesn't count.

7% of people get their friends to cut their hair or do it themselves, which is always amusing  especially when they fuck it up, persevere, and end up looking like Jack Nicholson at the end of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest.

I'm going to suggest that 9.9% of people go to London to get their head-gardens tended to. This is mainly because everybody around here seems to be a commuter now. At least, I presume that's why they look so miserable.

4% will be hairdressers who clearly live in some kind of dimension where time does not affect the length of their hair until they feel like a change of style, at which point it will either sprout in Hydra-fashion or get sucked back into their heads to take up all the space left by their absent brain.

3% simply refuse to get our hair cut, for fear it would reduce our souls.

And 8% are too cool to go to the hairdressers and so just get a monthly treatment of chemo-therapy.

That's 81.9% of people who don't get their hair cut at a hairdressers in this town. 81.9! I know, I was shocked too. Out of 43, 000, that leaves 7783. This means each salon has only 204.8 customers! Of these customers, let's say 20% get their hair cut every month, 50% every two months, 18% every three, and the final 12% once a year. Let's also say that the average price of a haircut is, ooo, £25.

This means, per annum, each hairdressing establishment in this town only earns ... Oh. That's still quite a lot  of money actually.

Damn it, I was going to make a point about how they must be in league with Satan but it appears it's a legitimate, profitable business which profoundly rips us all off. I appear to have wasted your time again, sorry.

I'm still not getting in a mobile one though.