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Comment by ponker | Hacker News Reader

Except not only the rich can win. My longtime barber is a Vietnamese guy who speaks very broken English. When I go and get a haircut his son was often in the store studying. My barber would tell him a math problem, like 257 times 191 or whatever, then the kid would produce the answer, then my barber would interrupt my haircut to whip out a calculator and check.

Kid got a full scholarship to Duke University. And I’ve seen this in other Asian immigrants as well, a cab driver in NYC whose daughter was at Cornell Medical School.

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Barbering can be a surprising lucrative career. Especially men's barbering. Has a particularly high dollar/hour rate too.

Tooling is $1k for clippers and scissors and razors. Not sure about chairs, but probably another $1k.

Suppose you charge $20 a cut, typical cut takes ~15-20 minutes and you're open 360 days a year.

10 cuts/day => $72k/yr. 2-3 hours of work a day.

20 cuts/day => $144k/yr. 4-5 hours of work a day.

Find reasonable rent and you're netting a pretty good profit. And yes it's an easy space to enter, but generally, once men find "their barber", they're locked in for pretty much the rest of their life and become a regular customer every 2-3 weeks.

Assuming you can keep your customer queue sufficient at all times, and that your clients can come when you are open.

Most likely this means a location that already has a high throughput of potential customers and that also most likely means a place that has high rents.

Sure, if you already have a place, like an extra room in your house, and you manage to establish yourself on the area. But even then you might find out that your first client wants to come in at 7 or 8 am, to get ready for whatever work thing they have that day, and the last client wants to come in at 8 pm, because they can’t earlier.

By the sound of it barbering resembles consulting a lot. Being in a lively area could help find some customers at first, but once you have established relationships with customers that value you specifically you can probably set up anywhere.

(And if someone wants to come in at strange hours for important work appearances, I’m sure they won’t mind being charged double the price either!)

> once men find "their barber", they're locked in for pretty much the rest of their life and become a regular customer every 2-3 weeks.

I’m curious whether it’s really specific to male population, and if so why…

That aside, and I can’t believe that this is where the thread took us, I empathise so much with this. Even in countries where I can converse easily with anybody it’s a struggle for me to trust someone with my hair, despite me presumably not really caring about it. Now living in countries where I don’t speak local languages and locals predominantly don’t speak any of mine (or do so with much difficulty) I haven’t gone to a barber in years—I pretty much gave up and just live with terrible hair. I guess if I ever find “my barber” I may be willing to travel far to get my haircut.

LOL. 360 days a year tells me everything I need to know about your analysis.

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