A Hair Cut, A Fair Cut

I've been putting off getting a haircut for a while now, and I knew that it had been too long since my last cut when I discovered that I could floss my teeth with my own hair. My problem wasn't so much not wanting to cut my hair, rather, it was paying for someone to do it for me.

A place just opened up in Provo that advertises $5 haircuts for both men and women so today I thought I would give it a try. I've had a lot of bad haircuts in my life (just look at my school pictures) so I thought I couldn't loose. Let me explain to you why a $12 dollar haircut at Great Clips doesn't sound so expensive to me anymore.

The first thing I noticed when I got to the salon was actually what I didn't notice: people. Usually when I go to get my haircut, I put my name on a list, flip through a People magazine and make the same conclusion I always make, that is, I will never allow my daughters to have a magazine subscription. But, at $5 Cuts, (yes, the price of the haircut is also the name of the store. It makes it easier to remember), when I walked in the door I was immediately ushered to a chair that would be my seat for the next half-hour.

The stylist who cut my hair was actually very nice. She was a fake blonde recently removed from Vegas who loved to ask me personal questions and wash my hair (she did it twice). She had come into $5 Cuts only an hour earlier for a job interview to find out that not only did she get the job, but that the job started right away. Like me, she never had time to flip through the People magazine. She admitted that I was her first haircut at this salon but she quickly reassured me that I was not her first haircut...she had graduated from a hair academy three years earlier. What a relief...

There was another person in the salon with us. He was a little older than me, well-dressed, and possessed the type of mannerisms you'd expect to see in the owner of the salon. He comfortably slid into our hair-talk and casually asked me several get-to-know-you type questions. In my mind I asked, "why is he talking to me? Isn't that what the stylist gets paid for?" I didn't have the heart to tell him the principles I had learned earlier in the week in my Economics class, namely that the opportunity cost of him making smalltalk with a customer like me was valuable time he could spend doing more important things like advertising, budgeting, or planning to take over the haircutting world.

To be honest, my haircut experience wasn't that bad. Whatever mistakes were made will soon grow out and whatever was missed will get cut next month. Actually, I found out that today was really my lucky day. Tomorrow the price of a haircut goes up to $6 which leaves me wondering how I could be so lucky and what the name of the salon will be!