the Cost of Basic Hair Cuts

The price included a quick cut with clippers and a $2 tip.

Like all hair cutter places, this one sold a variety of hair care products and also did other services besides haircuts, including tinting, perms, styling, and hair braiding.

They're also next door to a nail salon so they've got that going for them as well.

As summer is starting here in Arizona, I wanted a close cut that would make it easy to shave my head again. I find the bald scalp a lot cooler in the summer heat than a full head of hair. First time I shaved my head, I had preposterously long hair had cut it off to donate it to a charity that makes wigs for kids who go bald because of cancer treatments or immune diseases.

Considering a set of clippers runs about 10 times the price of my haircut, and I wouldn't end up using them more than once a year, the $8 for an impossible to screw up hair cut is eminently reasonable. My regular barber would have charged $25 for the same haircut, which would have rounded to $30 with tip.

If I'd just started hacking away at my hair with my razor, I would have gone through at least a dozen blades before I got down to bare scalp. Not to mention how much damage in nicks and scratches and gouges I would have done to myself in the process.

If you know what you want and you know it won't be easy to screw up, don't hesitate to go to the cheapest barber around. If you make a mistake and go to a barber that makes a lot of mistakes, don't worry, it's easy enough to find a place that can fix the problem (though that's usually extra on top of the price of competence). And even if it's really bad, the worst that can happen is you shave your head and start over.

Sometimes the risk is worth it. My brother found an amazing barber in Chicago, who only charges $5 for simple men's haircuts (though my brother tips him $10, or so he claims), by simply looking for the cheapest of all options.