A Cut Above Despite National Trend Downward, Barber Shops In North Idaho Continue To Flourish

They seem to be vanishing from the face of America, swept up by the hand of time and nudged to the brink of existence the way of the buffalo, five-and-dime, corner candy store and drive-in movie.

Once the cornerstone of a community, the heart and soul of every Main Street in the nation, the barber shop, with its distinctive red, white and blue pole, is becoming a fading memory.

Yet, for reasons that go against economic trends, barber shops in the Idaho Panhandle, especially around Sandpoint and Coeur d’Alene, are flourishing. Despite strong competition from unisex salons, they carry on as if low prices and competition didn’t exist. While most of the nation’s barbers are losing market shares to corporate salons, North Idaho barbers are finding their business is only getting better.

From politics to football, hunting to auto repair, barber shops were once a gathering place to discuss and debate every topic under the sun; stacks of Popular Mechanics and Sports Afield grew like cornstalks, and the barber in his white coat always knew your name.

It was a Saturday morning ritual, as if a bell had tolled, pulling neighbors from all walks of life through the door of a small shop alive with scents of talcum, after-shave and hair tonic.

Yet somewhere under the corporate grindstone and through time itself, small barber shops were lost in the shuffle, gobbled up by spacious, well-lighted salons positioned in high-traffic malls. Salons are open seven days a week providing not just low prices but speed: get your hair cut in 10 minutes, grab a fast-food burger within another minute and a half, and be on your way.

The barber shop wasn’t a place to rush in and out of like a turnstile to a departing subway. Unchanging and unadorned, it was a place where you sat and thumbed through the same magazines you saw last time and the time before that, listened to the barber forecast next winter’s weather, talk how the Red Sox would blow it again and how Castro was not to be trusted.

Time stood still in the warmth of a dusty little shop with its illuminated red-white-and-blue pole bolted to the doorjamb and the Army-Navy game sputtering over the static of a transistor radio.

Gil McIlvaney, a retired barber from Torrance, Calif., who spends his summers near Spirit Lake, Idaho, will tell you not only where barbering has gone, but why.

“People confided in you,” McIvlaney said. “No matter who they were. You were almost like family. You knew who was doing what to who, you were always being invited to customers’ weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs and wakes.

“Things were different then. No one was looking for a 10-minute haircut or rushing to go here and there. But it all started changing real quick when the big boys came to town.”

National chain salons can attend to more than 10 times the number of customers most barbers could comfortably handle in a day.

“Cookie-cutter haircuts,” McIlvaney said with disgust. “That’s what they’ll give you over there, with one eye on the clock and the other on the appointment book. They don’t know nothing about who they’re giving a haircut to. You’re just a number there, another quick buck.”

Independent barbers “were like the barber poles out front: We stood for something real.”

Dating back hundreds of years, the barber pole advertised that both medical attention and a haircut were available inside. The white color represented bandages, red stood for blood, and blue was for veins.

“Back in the old days, barbers were the doctors of the community,” McIlvaney said. “If you had a bad tooth, the barber pulled it. He did it all. Half these so-called stylists in these franchises don’t know jack about barbering.”

A barber shop’s relaxed nature provided a haven for people rushing through life, McIlvaney said.

“We never pushed for setting chair-time or watching the clock when it came to cutting people’s hair,” he said. “It was always about taking the time with each individual, hearing what was on (his) mind, and about relaxing in that big swivel. It was sort of like being on the lake with your buddy when the bass start hitting. Why would you want to rush through something like that?”

Maybe there’s a special charm about small-town America that makes it more conducive for the survival of the independent barber shop.

“Sandpoint has been good to me, I can’t complain,” said Huston Taylor, owner of Hoots Barber Shop in the Bonner Mall. He’s run the single-chair shop for a decade.

“I’m staying busy, business is steady as ever, and if there’s competition out there from the franchises, I’m not feeling it. I’m just rolling along.”

Finding an empty chair in any barber shop from Sandpoint to Coeur d’Alene on a Saturday is like trying to buy a Super Bowl ticket 20 minutes before kickoff. They’re simply packed.

Sandpoint’s Pend Oreille Barber Shop is furnished with oak and brass, exuding a warm feeling for customers as they wait, browsing through magazines.

Owners Robyn Blee and Jim Aiken will tell you not only why they’re doing so well but why barbering in general will survive the onslaught of franchise salons.

“I don’t know how you can give someone a terrific cut that they’ll be happy with in 10 minutes,” Aiken said.

“Convenience by hours” is the only thing franchise salons has to offer, he said.

“A lot of our customers go there once because they’re in a mall (but they) come running back to us,” Blee said. “Actually, they help our business more than they hurt it.”

Diversity and a personal touch will always make a good barber shop withstand whatever coupons or deals franchise salons pitch to the public, Aiken said.

“Believe me, you can’t and won’t get a precision styled cut in 10 minutes,” he said. “It’s unthinkable.”

Not everyone, however, finds barber shops an appealing place for a trim.

Phil Rizzo, who grew up in Philadelphia in a family of barbers, actually prefers a 10-minute cut in a salon over a barber shop. His father, brother, uncle and three cousins made their living as barbers. A computer programmer who shuttles between Spokane and Portland, Rizzo remembers listening to raging arguments at Fourth of July picnics about how the Beatles and the franchises were attempting to wipe barbers off the face of the Earth.

“Call it nostalgia, but I really would like to support the independent barber,” Rizzo said as he walked out of a chain shop at the Silver Lake Mall.

But independent barber shops seem to be located in hard-to-find locations, he said, and some are downright dreary.

“I walked into one that had a moose head and a stuffed barracuda mounted on the wall with a musket I think the guy found at Gettysburg,” Rizzo said. “You think I want to stare at a wall of dead animals when I get my hair cut?

“I never thought I’d say this, but I like the atmosphere and the quickness the salons offer. I don’t have all day to schmooze about the weather.”

Michael Cheevers, owner of Family Values Barber Shop in Coeur d’Alene, has nothing against franchises or their employees. Everyone has to make a living.

Cheevers put in more than 1,500 hours training at barber college, and as a student did some 15 haircuts a day.

Barbers who have survived the changing world of fashion have learned how to market themselves to compete with unisex salons, Cheevers said.

“We’re even starting to give seminars to cosmetologists on new haircutting techniques,” he said. “Our future is pretty secure here.”

Independent barbers in cities across the country may be collapsing under the weight of high rents and the flood of aggressive salons. But, as Cheevers sees it, the outlook for cutting hair in the Idaho Panhandle couldn’t be brighter.

“The future of barbering around here,” he said, “is so wide open it’s scary.”