Barber Chair Thoughts

Today I got my hair cut.  It’s an experience I dread because the barber’s chair is a place of gossip and endless talk, and I’m just not up for that.

I did talk a bit.  I asked the hair stylist (I guess that’s what you call a person who cuts hair, even if you’re not getting yours ‘styled’) a couple questions about her day, about whether it’s busy, and about whether things like whether and time of year have effect on how busy a place is.

Yes, she guessed, a sunny day will make things slower if it’s been raining a little while.  She didn’t comment on yearly patterns, and my guess is few people think about such things, and even fewer even try to predict such a pattern.

So, how does a barber shop predict how many people it needs to employ on a particular day, at a particular time of year?  How does an eatery (a fast food joint, a fine dining locale, etc.) decide how many people it needs preparing and serving food on one Saturday compared to the next?  How does a  retail store decide it needs x numbers of associates (terrible word) on one Saturday compared to the next, and no major sale on either?

It appears to me that the answer is they don’t know.  If you go to Subway (eat fresh?) sometimes there’s one person working alone during a rush; sometimes there’s three, four, five people and there’s no ‘rush.’  If you go to a grocery, or retail, store sometimes there’s quite a  wait to buy things, and sometimes it seems like you’re the only customer in the store.

Despite all the credit cards and member cards that every store now seems to encourage you to participate in, it doesn’t appear to help predict what people will buy.  Needing ink for printer I went not long ago to Best Buy and informed that cashier that the ink I needed was gone.  I was told, essentially, that it would be several days before they got a shipment of ink, because, with a major sale coming up the trucks were only bringing items like TVs.  Great!  So, because a sale approacheth, stock ye not small items.

The hair is shorter now.  … Until next time, when there may or may not be stylists in abundance.