Barber shops, salons to reopen today

Today marks the end of the 53-day coronavirus stay-at-home order in Louisiana, and residents who may have grown out their hair while businesses remained closed now have the chance to remedy that.

Included among the types of businesses who may now open their doors as the state enters Phase One of economic reopening are barber shops and salons. Like other non-essential establishments, they must maintain social distancing and capacity limits through the current phase.

But for business owners like Russell Moore, who runs Rumo’s Barber Shop in downtown Ruston, reopening with limits is better than nothing.

“Being able to restrict ourselves is worth it in order to get back to work,” Moore said.

Phase One requires non-essential businesses to limit customers to 25% of the building’s total legal capacity.

In order to help accomplish this, Rumo’s is eliminating its regular waiting space and asking patrons to wait outside or in their cars until their appointment.

The barber shop is requiring employees and customers to wear face masks in the building. Moore said those are the main changes to normal operations, since the business is already required to maintain high sanitation standards.

“Pretty much everything that’s required in this first phase has been barber guidelines anyway, other than face masks and limited people in the building,” he said. “We’ve always had sanitation guidelines, and those are more than enough.”

At The Strand Hair Salon, stylists will escort customers with appointments into the building after conducting temperature checks to ensure visitors aren’t sick.

Patrons must wear masks and should call upon arrival and wait outside or in their car until the stylist comes outside.

Like Moore, David Berry at The Buzz Barbershop said operations won’t be vastly different than normal. He already takes only one customer at a time, so the main capacity change will be that others waiting their turn must do so outside.

“Barber shops and salons, we’ve been dictated to about cleanliness for 30 years,” he said. “It’s a little extra but not too much different.”

Even as the state transitions into economic reopening, the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Lincoln Parish is up to 116, according to Thursday’s report from the Louisiana Department of Health.

That’s a single-case jump from the previous day’s report. How many of the 116 cases are active is unknown. The total also includes the original COVID diagnoses for the 13 parish residents who have died from the illness.

The number of COVID-19 swab tests done in Lincoln Parish stands at 1,974.

Having been forced to close for roughly eight weeks, Berry said donations from loyal customers and some Paycheck Protection Program loan money has kept things afloat, but not comfortably.

“We’re two months out — income needs to start coming in,” he said.

Moore said the coronavirus situation caused an abrupt halt to what he thought was a constant business.

“We thought we were sort of recession-proof: there’s nothing that could make people not be able to get a haircut,” he said. “But this was the one thing ever that did that.”

Luckily, with a city full of people with no one to cut their hair, things have already booked up considerably. Moore said the calendar at Rumo’s is full for “weeks and weeks.”

“This virus robbed us of the ability to go and make a living,” he said. “I will never take for granted an honest day’s work again in my life.”