Why no appointments
Three real reasons, and none of them is that we like it the old way.
A haircut is not a fixed length. It is eighteen minutes or it is thirty-two, depending on the head and the conversation. An appointment book made of twenty-minute slots is a book that runs forty minutes late by two in the afternoon, every single day, and then the man at four o’clock is angry about a promise nobody could have kept.
Walk-ins are the neighbourhood. A man who has a spare half hour at eleven on a Tuesday comes in. If he had to book on Thursday for the following Tuesday, he would not, and about a third of this shop’s business is that man.
The queue is the room. The bench, the paper, the talk between strangers who are all waiting for the same thing. Book every chair and the bench is empty, and then it is just a room where hair gets cut.
How to make the wait shorter
Ring first. (718) 555-0168. Somebody will pick up and tell you honestly how many are ahead. We have never told anybody it is twenty minutes when it is an hour, because they turn up and find out.
Come at the odd hours. Tuesday morning, Thursday at half past five, Saturday at four.
Leave and come back, but tell somebody first. Say you are going for a coffee and we will hold your turn for one chair, which means if you are not back when your chair opens you go behind the next man rather than to the bottom.