Should It Feel Wrong To Hope The Bay Area’s Hair Salons Can Reopen?
A major effect of the COVID 19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown has been how it has made things that were once among the most routine, mundane elements of everyday life feel like nigh-unattainable luxuries. One of the most visible of these is the ability to get a haircut, once taken for granted by nearly everyone, especially in major urban areas. The options on hand in a city like San Francisco could at times seem bewilderingly diverse, from chains like Supercuts to high-end, boutique salons to a breed of hole-in-the wall shops that have clung on to life in a city where they feel increasingly like a dying breed with each passing year.
2020 has quite obviously changed all of this. Throughout the nation’s major urban areas, hair salons have been forced to shut down due to government mandates. The “quarantine haircut” has become a new fixture of life, as co-workers compare their overgrown manes- via Zoom calls, of course- not in person, not anymore. Online startups emerged that sought to capitalize on the new reality, such as You Probably Need A Haircut, which offers at-home tutorials on how to manage one’s hair from top stylists online.
In the Bay Area, hope briefly emerged that hair salons could return to something bearing a passing resemblance to normalcy early this summer. July 13 was the date originally set by the city of San Francisco for a number of institutions to reopen, with hair salons set to be among them. With San Francisco seemingly doing well in its trend of cases as summer began, the city felt comfortable enough to move its date of opening up to June 29.
Alas, this potentially hopeful state of affairs did not persist for long. New cases of COVID 19 cases began to rise, the city has paused its reopening plans indefinitely. Some relief has been attempted- in late July, California Governor Gavin Newsom ruled that hair salons in counties on California’s “watch list” for COVID 19 could reopen for outdoor service only. However, this is not a workable solution for many Bay Area business owners, who will be forced to remain closed.
During the pandemic, my thoughts have often strayed to the owner of the local hair salon to whom I have turned for haircuts since I was around ten years old. She is the prototypical San Francisco small business owner- in business for more than a quarter century, long enough time to see her son- a few years younger than myself, who I remember running around as a small child underfoot when I was getting my own hair cut- grow into a young adult who now worked alongside her cutting hair.
From time to time, I look up the name of her salon on Google to see what has become of it during this period of enforced shutdown. To my relief, so far the status of it still reads “temporarily closed” rather than “permanently closed,” the fate that has befallen so many other small business owners here and around the country. Unfortunately, her small store on a busy street is unsuited for an outdoor reopening, so she will have to hold out longer, as will many others.
The question is how much longer can people like her hold out before their livelihoods are ruined- with government assistance flawed and inadequate to say the least, especially from the federal government. The problems with the small business assistance package in the last federal stimulus bill have been well documented, and negotiations on a new round of stimulus have been going badly. This shutdown will have accelerated a process that has been long ongoing in major American urban centers in general and the Bay Area in particular- and that is the displacement of anyone not at the extremes of the income scale. My old hairdresser exemplifies a strain of middle-class San Francisco that, long being priced out of the city by ever-increasing rents and general cost of living, may be killed off for good by the pandemic.
I was able to recently get a haircut and tame my uncontrolled “quarantine mane” but I had to go to the far reaches of the state to do so. Up in the Lake Tahoe area, hair salons are open, and I was able to get a long-overdue trimming. The procedures in place felt like a model of safety- no one on the premises was unmasked, all appointments had to be checked in ahead of time, and cleaning and disinfecting procedures were in place.
I found myself forced to ask- what makes this unsafe to be applied in a city like San Francisco? Obviously the city itself is much, much higher in population density than the Lake Tahoe area, which is a major factor no doubt. However, as long as the amount of people in the hair salon at any given time is regulated, that should compensate for that as much as could reasonably be expected. Compare to outdoor restaurants, which have been reopen in San Francisco for some time now; while outdoor environments have been shown to reduce the risk of COVID 19 transmission , diners at these restaurants sit in close proximity to each other with no masks. Are hair salons where everyone is masked really more of a risk?
It will be easy for some to reflexively dissmiss any thoughts of this as callous and superficial, to point a finger at me for supposedly putting haircuts over human lives. No such thing is intended- merely observation and reflection on one aspect of how the economic toll inflicted on people like my old hairdresser is in fact a human one. It feels like a more creative solution to address this issue could be employed by the authorities in this situation, and for her sake and others, I hope that such a solution is found and implemented sooner rather than later.
