PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

How can a bar­ber walk in­to a bank with $1mil­lion, which he re­port­ed­ly earned from his trade?

It might take some time, but ac­cord­ing to one bar­ber, it’s isn’t that far­fetched.

“It ranges from bar­ber­shop to bar­ber­shop and with the price of hair­cuts now could prob­a­bly be $80, $100 up­wards. A bar­ber ba­si­cal­ly could make any­way from 12 to 15 thou­sand dol­lars up­wards,” said Roger Hug­gins, a bar­ber at Wes­ley’s In­ter­na­tion­al in Wood­brook.

The Guardian crunched the num­bers based on Hug­gins’ claim av­er­aged about 20 hair­cuts per day.

With that fig­ure with a set price of $50 per hair­cut, a bar­ber like Hug­gins, work­ing 5 days a week could make over $20,000 a month or $240,000 per year.

This means that a bar­ber can earn over $1mil­lion in five years or less, de­pend­ing on their client base or pric­ing.

“Back in the days it was on­ly women spend­ing their mon­ey, do­ing their hair, do­ing their nails and so forth but now men are tak­ing bet­ter care of them­selves. Now guys come in bar­ber­shops, they com­ing every week, every two weeks every month it de­pends on the hair­style. So bar­ber­ing has moved very far from then to now,” he said.

Hug­gins, a bar­ber since his teenage years, said es­pe­cial­ly with the rise in fo­cus on male groom­ing, a bar­ber can not on­ly find steady in­come but mul­ti­ple sources as well.

“You don’t re­al­ly just base it on the in­come of the bar­ber­shop, be­cause bar­bers be­come a lit­tle more savvy now, they start do­ing busi­ness out­side of the bar­ber­shop. You know a lot of bar­bers do bar­ber­ing, they do con­struc­tion, they in­to sell­ing clothes,” said Hug­gins, “Bar­ber­ing could be a step­ping stone to a lot of dif­fer­ent things. As they say, mul­ti­ple streams of in­come,” he said.

“They use the pow­er of us­ing the client, not on­ly as a cus­tomer for the hair­cut but an over­all cus­tomer where they could pro­vide their needs. Cloth­ing, whether it be cloth­ing, whether need some work done at home. Or do some con­struc­tion, some light con­struc­tion and so forth. And all this is cash mon­ey,” he said, al­though he ad­mit­ted that these ad­di­tion­al mon­ey streams may not be re­port­ed to the au­thor­i­ties or may be list­ed un­der the bar­ber­shop.

He said the Min­is­ter’s com­ments were un­for­tu­nate, as the bar­ber­ing busi­ness had seen a boom in re­cent years.

“He prob­a­bly used that on his ex­pe­ri­ence of bar­ber­ing, you know not ac­tu­al­ly be­ing in the are­na it­self to see how far bar­ber­ing has moved. It have hair con­certs, it have hair shows, it have a whole lot of dif­fer­ent things per­tain­ing to bar­ber­ing right now,” said Hug­gins.