Rules about mask-wearing have been debated in various walks of life for the past two years. A listener asked our “OH Really?” team how to find barbershops where the staff is masked and vaccinated.
The State Cosmetology and Barber Board licenses people to cut hair in Ohio, but it does not keep any stats on whether they’re vaccinated or wear masks. A listener from Akron says he’d like to find shops which do those things, since it’s already difficult to distance while cutting hair.
In Summit County, Health Commissioner Donna Skoda says not only would that information be difficult to track, but there’s also no longer a mask-mandate.
“It stopped the spread. But it is a high-risk business, because usually you’re in a smaller area [and] there’s a lot of people in there, unless you only have one customer at a time.”
Waverly Willis owns the Cleveland-based Urban Kutz chain of barbershops and says he just completed a staff training on COVID protocols.
“If a person is wearing a mask when they get in the chair, ask them, ‘Would you feel more comfortable if I put my mask on?’ I know all shops are not as accommodating as that, but I think it would be silly to lose a client over me not wearing a mask for 15 minutes," he said.
“COVID-19 takes a lot of the conversation up in the shops. At the end of the day, we're in a service industry. We need you to continue to come to us. So, if I just shoot down what you think about this virus, most likely you will never come back, and we do not want that.”
Willis says when it comes to COVID it’s sometimes best just to “agree to disagree."
Last spring, he opened his shops up as vaccination sites and received a number of negative comments via social media.
And since there’s currently no list of vaccinated barbers in Ohio, Willis says customers will just have to call around until they find a shop where they know they can be comfortable. He’s currently planning to open his third location in mid-February, in the Northwest/Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood.
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