Is Bern the haircut capital of the world?

March 23, 2011, 7 Comments

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When the weather plays along, and I’m not running late, I walk to work. It’s uphill most of the way but only takes about ten minutes, assuming I don’t get sidetracked by one of the bakeries on the way. Over the last few years I’ve done that walk many times and what has never ceased to amaze me is just how many hairdressers there are. So the other day, I left home earlier than normal and counted (& photographed) every salon I passed. I thought there’d be at least ten, given how many I’d noticed in passing. But even I was stunned at the end result.

Twenty eight. TWENTY EIGHT hairdressers along a 1.3km route that barely even passes through the city centre proper. It’s almost unbelievable that so many can exist so close to each other. There are six in my street alone, each within snipping distance of the next. How do they all survive? Does hair in Bern grow so much more quickly than elsewhere? If I were to get my hair cut once a month, which is probably about average for a man, it would take me well over two years to visit all of these hairdressers. July 2013 – that’s when I could go back to Coiffure No 1 on my list, assuming no new ones had opened in the meantime.

To celebrate this hair-raising discovery, I created the above map. Each dot is a hairdresser, and if you click on it, a picture of the establishment in question will pop up. Just a little bit of fun to keep you busy for a coffee break. Although some are hidden away upstairs, notice how many have a street-front presence. That might seem odd – who goes window-shopping for haircuts or decides to have one because they saw a nice style in the window? – but with this much competition around, they clearly have to do everything to attract the punters. There are even two in the station, and that’s not because  Swiss trains are so late that you usually have time for a short back-and-sides. This isn’t Italy. No, it’s because these two are allowed to open evenings and Sundays, like any shop in the station. Some people can’t wait until Monday to be shorn.

If you’re thinking that my route to work is an exception, then think again. Bern is full of hairdressers. They are everywhere. In the city centre alone there are 134, and in the whole city, the total is an incredible 431! And that for a city with a population of 131,000. That works out at 3.3 hair salons for every 1000 inhabitants, far more than the other big Swiss cities, all of which are below the 3 per 1000 level; Geneva only manages 2.15 hairdressers per 1000 people. Next time I’m there, I must pay more attention to Genevese heads to see how they compare to Bernese standards. Then again, I haven’t noticed that Bernese hair is any better dressed than elsewhere. And that begs the question – who uses all these hairdressers?