…six bits! Anyone remember that little ditty?
Okay. Can anyone remember when a shave and a haircut actually cost six bits? That would be 75 cents, for those of you born in the latter third of the twentieth century.
Well, the new version is “Shave and a haircut…forty-five bucks!”
No joke, gents. Saturday, in search of a Sur la Table store, M’hijito and I paid a visit to the über-tony Kierland Commons, a fixture serving the ever-more-upscale hordes of north Scottsdale. We parked the car in front of a barber shop—barber salon may be better—whose window proudly advertised a shave and a haircut for $45.
Well, it’s a bargain, I guess: less than I paid, a few hours later, for a haircut alone.
Amazing, isn’t it, what inflation does to a currency? My father told me that when he was a young man delivering milk on a horse-drawn wagon, he earned ten dollars a month. I must have looked startled—at the time this conversation took place, ten dollars would buy a bag of groceries—because he hastened to assure me that $10 a month was a living wage then. He not only lived on it, he said, he lived decently on it.
When he retired, he figured his hard-earned life savings of $100,000 would make him set for life. Then came the double-digit inflation of the 1970s, which reduced its value by…what? two thirds? Today a nest egg of a million dollars feels a little skimpy, considering that most of us can expect to live well into our eighties and some will live into our nineties. I don’t know if the prospect of accruing $100,000 felt as daunting to my parents as a million-dollar target does to me. It never was enough to set them up in affluence, even when he first retired.
I do know that if I still had a job, I’d still be working toward a million-dollar retirement fund. And I wonder if it would be enough to allow me to run the heat in the winter and to cool the house into the comfortable range in the summer.
“Six bits,” by the way, represents inflation, too. The original ditty went
Shave and a haircut, two bits!
When I went to grad school in 1975, I frequented a coffee shop called Two Bit Rush, where the coffee indeed was a quarter.
Invest in some good clippers and a razor blade – cheap haircuts for guys for the rest of your life.
I cut my own hair and the Mrs. trims what I can’t see or feel.
There is an $8 haircut place here in town but I got a much better one in boot camp for free.
I heard my grandparents use the 2-bits reference when I was growing up but never knew what it meant. Now I do!
My haircuts cost $55. i envy my husband who gets a $10 cut as he has no special style.
I had to laugh because from the first sentence on, I was saying to myself, “isn’t it ‘two bits,’ not six? My husband wishes I could cut his hair, but he wears a fade on the sides — and I don’t trust myself to do that properly.