Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 301, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 December 1916 — BARBER BUSINESS GOOD [ARTICLE]

BARBER BUSINESS GOOD

New Tonsorial Luxuries Offset the Introduction of the Safety Razor. "To read the advertisements in the newspapers,” said the bosß barber, "you’d think that all creation was now using safety razors. As a matter of fact lots of men are using them, and this to some extent does affect the barber business, but not to the extent you might imagine. "Yon want to remember that many of the men now using safety razor* are men who before taking them up shaved themselves with razors of the ordinary sort and so they are not shaving cpjeomers lost to us, though we do lose from them the work we formerly had in honing their razors and keeping them in order. "At the same time we have lost some regular shaving customers who have never shaved themselves, but who have now taken up safeties, and with them too we have lost their honing jobs; and we do not now get as shaving customers all of the young men who in the ordinary course of things would have come to us when they began shaving,* young men who would never have shaved themselves with the ordinary razor but who have begun shaving with a safety. "On the other hand some young men beginning now to shave come to us, starting in with us and continuing with us quite in the old way; the net result of all these things being that the volume of shaving business done in barber shops now remains about stationary. "While this branch of its business may now not be increasing the barber shop is still far from declining; on the contrary its business is now greater than ever, showing in all its branches taken together an increase equal to the normal growth that might be expected in any business. Nobody has yet invented a self-oper* ated safety hair cutting machine, and so men still come to us to have their hair cut and their beards trimmed; and then there is now more luxury in barber shops and more wants supplied than ever before. In fact the modern Is about as different from the old time barber shop as anything you could think of.”— New York Sun.