What to expect when salons, barbershops reopen after coronavirus in Beaufort County
Anyone trying to get a haircut on Monday once salons and barbershops reopen should expect a wait.
Jeff Land, owner of The Barber Shop in Bluffton’s Buckwalter Place, said his phone has been ringing steadily since S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster announced that such close-contact businesses may reopen starting May 18. McMaster ordered them closed six weeks ago, on April 1, to help stop the spread of COVID-19.
Michelle Casey, owner of Chez Michelle on Arrow Road on Hilton Head Island, compared the rush to one the public has become familiar with during the coronavirus quarantine.
“We are the new toilet paper,” she said. “Finding a hair appointment will be as difficult as finding toilet paper in April.”
Casey explained that she has 200 rebookings to schedule before she can even think about other customers.
“I’m relieved the governor has given us a week to prepare,” she said on Tuesday.
The need for social distancing and added safety measures won’t make it any easier to get through the backlog of clients needing haircuts.
Casey said she’s planning extra time between appointments for cleaning and expects to work 12-hour days, six days a week until she catches up.
“People will be flocking to get appointments, even though we won’t be able to do the volume we used to,” she said.
Land said the chairs in his shop are already six feet apart, but his shop will be blocking out extra cleaning time between customers, even on top of what was standard before the closure.
“One thing about barbershops, for us, is the state holds a high regard on sanitation already,” he said. “We are not having to change a lot of our procedures because of that.”
His challenge, though, is that The Barber Shop caters to walk-ins, and those people need to be appropriately distanced while they wait their turn.
Seating will be available outside, or people can wait in their vehicles until they are called, but they won’t be able to wait inside.
“We can have one person per barber in the shop,” he said.
Casey also is reevaluating every part of the customer experience at Chez Michelle. Everyone will have to wash their hands when they arrive, she said, and there will be no magazines and no cups of coffee in an attempt to reduce “touch points.”
Clients and employees alike will be masked as much as possible, and anyone who is sick will be asked to go home, the salon owners said.
New business
Frankie Wiles’ business, Salon Glow, was scheduled to open on Plantation Park Drive in Bluffton April 1, the same day salons were ordered closed.
“That was literally the week that everything shut down,” she said.
Wiles, who owned her own salon in Nashville, said she moved to the Lowcountry to fulfill her dream of living at the beach. She worked for a few months at Salon Karma in Old Town Bluffton before deciding to venture back out on her own.
But instead of seeing clients at her new shop, she’s spent the last six weeks working in her yard, hanging out with her dog and learning to play the ukulele.
She said she’s been pushing back appointments repeatedly in the hopes that she would be able to open.
“This one lady, I think I called her at least six times,” Wiles said with a laugh.
She expects that owning her own shop could make it easier for her to keep her clients safe. In addition to blocking out more time than usual for sanitizing between clients, she won’t have any overlapping appointments.
“The only person they’ll really be coming into contact with is me,” she said.
Bright spots
Land said one thing he appreciated about the forced time off was the opportunity to meet owners of other Beaufort County barbershops. They got together to talk about business and take photos illustrating solidarity among the shops in calling for the reopening.
Casey said she was glad the uncertainty of wondering when shops can reopen is over, for her sake as well as for her clients.
“This has been such an emotional time for so many people,” she said, adding that many don’t understand the impact a hairdresser can have on a client’s mental state, how much they miss having someone to talk to, how much they miss being able to walk confidently out of the salon.
One of her clients wrote her a supportive letter during the closure pledging to send her a check every seven weeks until the salon was able to open again.
“They say that, at times like this, it doesn’t necessarily build character, it reveals it,” Casey said. “The kindness people showed ... I was just blown away.”
This story was originally published May 13, 2020 at 3:08 PM.
