The government ignoring barbers is a problem!
I know Farage and others have highlighed this issue, GBNEWS, etc, and still much seems to be done. Today I was reading in the Mail about a tiny Welsh village with 14 barbers!
Welsh ex mining town, under 6,000 inhabitants, with 14 barbers shops. Each apparently pulling in £9,000 a week, according to one claim.
These are barbers, not hairdressers, so lets drop in to 3,000 potential customers.
Let’s assume there’s no bald men here and that all the men of the town use them – instead of say letting their partner cut their hair – and they they have it cut every 3 months. If you say live in Chelsea and have a trendy buzz cut, sure, you’ll go more often, but a Welsh mining village…
I’m rounding here, but that’s 200 customers to a barber, 800 haircuts a year (16 haircuts a week). So the men of this broke ass village are paying About £560 a time for a haircut?
Let’s assume the quote was unclear and they are pulling a combined £9k a week (£640 a week per shop). That’s still £40 a haircut… A quick google pointed to a (2020) YouGov poll suggesting the average cost was £12, and that found most men (40%) paid between £10 and £15 for a haircut, while 29% paid between £5 and £10. So, not £40. Definitely not £560!
The Mail notes that when they visited the village, there were no customers on a weekday afternoon and some of the men’s salons were closed. The Mail also shared a video of a “huge street brawl sparked by ‘turf war’ over rival barber shops” (in a neighbouring town).
It was thirty years ago, but I’ve run a high street shop. Even then it was expensive. REALLY expensive. Even before you get to wages and your own salary, there’s rent, the council and water rates, dealing with Trading Standards when rivals kick off, dealing with police when your prices “seem to low”…
Amusing story.
I was read the riot act by trading standards over an ad I ran, comparing my prices to another computer company.
“You can’t do that. You can only compared like for like…”
Anyway, I pulled out the trade catalogues and said. “These are the supplier I use, that [he] uses, that pretty much all dealers in the UK use. These are the component prices, this is my build, this is his build using the same parts”
😀 The guy was LIVID. The other dealer had just sold him an Intel P90 chip for about £480, telling them it was a good price and “the best he could so”. List price – one off – was £125″
Point, is, if some seems squirrely, they are supposed to check. It is literally their job. But they aren’t.
If the council is turning a blind eye, and the police, and the government, then something is wrong. They KNOW some of these shops, like the vape shops and others are just fronts for money laundering, but they are given a free pass.
Someone in office getting paid off!
NCA: “Some barber shops such as this are claiming income of £100,000 to £150,000 a month”
“He has been seeing familiar patterns of shops staffed with asylum seekers or illegal immigrants, many of the people in the barber shops being from Kurdish backgrounds.”
“The NCA estimates that £12bn in illicit cash is laundered in the UK every year, some of it through criminal front organisations on the High Street.”
“He estimates across Rochdale there are more than 20 businesses that are fronts for criminal organisations and he says he sees many of the same people from Iran, Iraq and Kurdistan working in them.”
BBC, April 2025: Police raid barbers and vape shops suspected of being fronts for crime gangs
