Chemical weapons, cumulative attraction and the internet: How an Auckland suburb ended up with 10 barbershops within a few hundred metres of each other
Great stories don't have a use by date. So here’s a fantastic listen from the Stuff archives. Hear one of our excellent pieces of journalism told on The Long Read in the player below or find it on podcast apps like Apple, Spotify or Google or enjoy the article.
The Long Read is proudly brought to you by Auckland Museum
One friend calls it peak barber.
In the middle-class Auckland suburb of Birkenhead, a kilometre west of the Harbour Bridge, there’s now 10 men’s barber shops within a 400m radius.
Stand on the roundabout in the village shopping centre (motto: ‘Village with a View’) and you can see the striped poles in most directions.
At the Corner Barbers, Stephanie Smith had a customer recently who declared he was setting out to try every barber in the suburb. She was the first. “So I said ‘I’ll see you again in 12 months then.” (He was very happy with his haircut, she stresses, so expects to see him sooner.)
My investigations soon established that all of the barbers had noticed, all of them were asked regularly why this unusual phenomena had occurred, and none had developed a satisfactory answer. “Do you know why?” asked Corner Barber owner Laurel Hall as we peered out of her plate-glass window at the two rival shops opposite.
I do, now. Sort of. The answer, it turns out, is a complicated mix of a shifting male culture, the internet, the resulting rise of the service economy, the theory of “cumulative attraction” and the butterfly effect of a repressive Iraqi regime dropping chemical weapons on the villages of north Kurdistan some two generations ago.
On a mountainside above his home in Kurdistan, Amin Ismail watched the blooms of white smoke rise.
At just 19 years old, he was a resistance fighter in the Peshwaga, a Kurdish militia fighting for independence from a repressive Iraqi regime.
The Kurdish genocide of 1987 to 1989, led by Saddam Hussein’s cousin, “Chemical” Ali Hassan al-Majid, drove about 4000 Kurds to flee to Pakistan.
Ismail was one of those refugees. “There was so much bloodshed, so much killing,” he says.
After two of his friends died, he fled first to Iran, where he spent a month in hospital recuperating from the effects of the chemical bombing.
The United Nations (UN) then sent him to a refugee camp in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. He says it was overcrowded, dangerous, and riddled with theft.
But he quickly learned Urdu, and his combination of languages - Persian and Kurdish - saw him hired as a UN interpreter and given a house away from the camp.
He worked for the UN for five years, but says he found Pakistan a very repressive society for his wife, who could barely leave the house without being harassed, and he didn’t want his two sons growing up there. “I am lucky my kids are growing up here, I was very worried for them in Pakistan. It was a bad situation. Afraid to go outside. People would stare at you.”
Then the UN said because he had worked for them, he could have a choice: the United States or New Zealand. Thinking New Zealand was in Europe, he chose to come here, arriving at the Refugee Resettlement Centre in Mangere in 2000. “You have no money, no nothing, they give you a house, and a small benefit - so yes, it was very hard.”
But he found work in a Turkish bakery, his wages initially supplemented by Work and Income, and also passed his electrician’s ticket. Barbering, though, ran in the family - his brother owned a shop back home - and he was soon managing a five-seat shop in New Lynn.
But he says local Muslim extremists discovered his background and began to harass him because Peshwaga members had renounced their faith, believing “first we have to have freedom, then we have religion”. He says he was assaulted, one man threatened to kill him, and he had intimidating visits at home. Police installed a panic button in the shop. Seeking a more peaceful life, his son gave him $10,000 to set up business, and he wound up, quite content, in Birkenhead Point, in a small unit in a 1930s concrete block not far from the wharf.
Frightening as it is, Ismail’s story isn’t unusual. Two more Birkenhead barbershops are owned by families who, independently, took the same path, escaping the genocide first to Pakistan, then to New Zealand on the refugee quota.
Coincidence? Not really, explains Massey University professor Paul Spoonley.
I’d got Spoonley, an expert in demographics, thinking about the barbershop explosion. He’d noticed it, on a smaller scale, in his native Brown’s Bay.
Demographics expert Professor Paul Spoonley says the barbershop explosion is a new chapter in an old tale of migration patterns. PHOTO: CHRIS McKEEN
Demographics expert Professor Paul Spoonley says the barbershop explosion is a new chapter in an old tale of migration patterns. PHOTO: CHRIS McKEEN
It is, he thinks, an old tale rewritten for a new generation of migrants: just as Vietnamese and Cambodians once began bakeries, Chinese started market gardens and laundries, and Indians bought dairies, arrivals from the Middle East have found their own corner of the market.
Spoonley calls it an “ethnic-dominated niche business”, characterised by a hardworking labour force recruited through family and friends. He says it has come coupled with the trend of the haircut as a ritual, an event. Once, he says, his hair was cut by much older men, then by women, and now he sees younger, cooler guys working the clippers. “It’s like when I watch UK football: these guys are incredibly well-paid, but with incredibly bad haircuts.”
That could be one reason why 10 barbers can co-exist so closely, says Megan Phillips, AUT lecturer in retail marketing: “men are visiting barbers more often, and spending more money, so what you might imagine is a fairly static market is actually expanding.”
AUT retail expert Dr Megan Phillips has several theories why the shops are so close together. PHOTO: SUPPLIED
AUT retail expert Dr Megan Phillips has several theories why the shops are so close together. PHOTO: SUPPLIED
Expectations have also grown beyond the short back and sides. Skin fades are big. The BarberShopCo offers a “lookbook”, a catalogue of hairstyles, which includes a “faux hawk” and a “V Fade with Pompadour”. The mullet, everyone says, is also back, although BarberShopCo boss Andrew Garrett notes: “We’re not talking a dirty mullet. It’s quite styled, it’s all nicely blended: it’s done like a proper haircut.”
A similar shift appears to have happened in Britain, where the term “Turkish” barbers (from both Turkey and Kurdistan) has come to describe not the ethnicity of ownership, but a deluxe style of barbering experience that includes the burning of stray hairs in nostrils and eardrums. It’s also shorthand for a previously-unfamiliar work ethic. One British barber told the Economist in 2017: “The Turks keep us on our toes. Turks are willing to work seven days a week and you've got to admire a man who does that… we've started trying to do that now.”
The Kurdish influence has become generational. Dylan Ali, 23, sits on the bench seat outside the shop he owns, Ladies and Gents, some 400 metres up the street from Ismail’s place. Local MP Shanan Halbert walks past and they exchange waves.
Ali leaves his parents’ home in Takanini, south Auckland, at 6.30am, driving an hour north to arrive early enough to start the day with a coffee and a vape. His theory for the Middle Eastern dominance in barbering is that soldiers there have to be very clean-shaven, so their barbers have perfected the cut-throat shave.
The shop was called simply 'Gents' before Dylan bought it, and expanded.
The shop was called simply 'Gents' before Dylan bought it, and expanded.
Ali’s shop was originally called simply, Gents, operating out of a smaller unit next door, and he was an employee.
His dad, who came from Kurdistan, via Pakistan and - he thinks - China, arriving three years before Ali’s birth, asked if he would rather be his own boss and helped him buy the business. Last year, Ali signed a five-year lease on this bigger unit. Now his stepmother Lamya provides the “ladies” part of the expanded title.
Dylan's stepmother, Lamya, works with him.
Dylan's stepmother, Lamya, works with him.
Ali gets his own hair cut at a cousin’s shop in Browns Bay, and his uncle owns a constantly shifting number of shops in south and west Auckland. “I don’t know what else I would have done,” he says. “Maybe a trade?”
He got into barbering working for his uncle on weekends for pocket money, then did a three-month course at the Mr Barber training school in the city. “I started saving some money, and just didn’t stop. It’s something I enjoy.”
Mainly, he says, “for the different people you meet. You go through 50 to 100 people a week, so you get all those different stories.”
Merely five shopfronts down Birkenhead Ave is the appropriately-named Happy Barber, with its $15 seniors cuts some of the cheapest of the village’s offerings. Owner Mustafa Wasta explains: “Old ones [do] not have too much [hair], so I am not happy to charge [the] normal rate.”
It’s called Happy Barber, he says, because “we are happy here, I am working with my wife, and before I had a hard job, and now it is close to my retirement. If [a] customer is happy, I am.” For 18 years, he owned a kebab shop in Glen Innes, and says it meant long hours. He turns 65 this year, but plans to keep working past retirement because, he says, wife Kelly is much younger (they have 12 and 11-year-old children).
Wasta arrived here in 1997, via Iraq and seven years in Pakistan, from Kurdistan. He says he likes New Zealand’s small population, multiculturalism and its peace. Kelly Wasta came a decade later when she married him. She was a barber in the Kurdish capital, Erbil. Does she like working with her husband? “Yes, of course,” she smiles. “I just wish we [could] have a day off together.” He works Saturdays, she works Sundays. “I don’t feel like I am from Kurdistan any more, I feel like I am from New Zealand, it is so friendly.”
The internet has had a corrosive effect on the suburban high street. If you can buy something cheaper and easier online, explains Andrew Hay, then the shops that once sold that product are going to close down.
Hay, a local who gets his hair done at All Cuts, is chairman of the Auckland branch of the Property Council and general manager of commercial at Stride Property. He says shops that prosper now are those that do things the internet can’t replicate. That’s services: so while Birkenhead has no bookshop, sports shop, hardware store or big-brand clothing chain, it has an over-supply of coffee shops, nail bars, hairdressers and, yes, barbers.
While encircled by wealthy suburbs, Birkenhead’s centre itself isn’t particularly affluent, and the mall’s star tenant, the Warehouse, departed in the middle of last year. Its former space sat empty until a coronavirus vaccination centre recently replaced it.
Hay says Birkenhead lacks a landmark retailer that would influence its orbit - for example, a branch of the high-end food store Farro in a previously industrial corner of Grey Lynn has attracted home design stores around it.
The shops around the mall, says Hay, are likely owned by a variety of smaller landlords, meaning no exclusivity clauses in leases to give one barber dominance, and rents are probably comparatively low, allowing a small barbering business to be profitable.
But he suspects peak barber may soon be over. “You’re starting to see an evolution in Birkenhead: craft beer, better quality cafes, and more intensification. And I think as more and more residents are living immediately in the area, they will demand better amenities on their doorstep. ...Once there is more demand for different uses, they will pop up.”
That hollowing out of traditional retail has left a very different-looking high street to the one on which Horace “Diddy” Burford opened his combined barber, tobacconist and lottery shop in October 1930.
Back then, Corner Barber was the only show in town and in the heart of the Depression, Diddy was the only one of six siblings with a job.
Ninety-one years later, it’s still run by his daughter, Laurel Hall, a former Miss Birkenhead, who took over in 2006 after first Horace - “a very quiet, kind man: we always thought we had the best father ever” - then her mother Audrey passed away.
'Diddy' Burford's daughter, Laurel Hall, runs the village's oldest shop.
'Diddy' Burford's daughter, Laurel Hall, runs the village's oldest shop.
She removed the tobacco counter, but much remains the same and the shop prides itself on tradition; they still offer Bay Rum cologne with every cut.
“We are,” she says, “a family barber”.
“We get from tiny tots to their 90s. We’ve got to be versatile, and also able to talk to that age range. You’ve got to be able to talk to these kids about what they like for lunch ... and the older ones about their operations.”
Laurel Hall says it's the people that keep her working in the industry. "I love the people."
Laurel Hall says it's the people that keep her working in the industry. "I love the people."
Asked about what’s changed, Hall takes the Zhou Enlai approach (the Chinese leader who was - wrongly - thought to have answered “too soon to tell” when asked in 1970 about the impact of the 1789 French Revolution), and says the biggest impact was the way Beatles-inspired teenagers deserted barbers for hairdressers in the 1960s.
With such a long view of history, she seems fairly unperturbed by her new rivals. Yes, she agrees, there’s been an impact - but she still has regulars who’ve been coming here for 30 years.
Around the corner, Bob Singh, a 22-year veteran of Birkenhead barbering, is cheek by jowl with one of the newer arrivals, Maxy Barber, but has an equally optimistic demeanour.
“The reason why people get into barbering is,” says Singh, before breaking into song, “money, money, money. They think it is fast money. So people come in with the least experience and the job is not done right.”
Singh considers he has a higher calling. As a 4-year-old sweeping the shop floor, he learned literally at the feet of his father, the late Pita Anand Singh, in his Suva barbers. “I saw my father cutting hair, talking, laughing, smiling at people from all over the world,” he says. “Barbering is in the bloodstream. What else can you do?”
Bob Singh takes his job seriously, despite the smiles: barbering is in the blood.
Bob Singh takes his job seriously, despite the smiles: barbering is in the blood.
Singh’s waist-length dreadlocks (combined with shaved sides and a dyed purple flat-top, a look he curates himself) were last shorn two decades ago as part of the mourning ritual for his father, who shaved the last scalp of his 45-year career on the day he died.
Singh shows off a photo of his daughter, aged about 8, helping out in the shop. But his three children have embarked on careers in engineering, plumbing and health science. “My kids are all office fellas. I thought they would follow me.” He says he will instead try and recruit his grandchildren.
He’s proud though. “My boy is 21 and he’s on a hundred bucks an hour. A hundy at 21! At 21, I was a real rough dog.” That was when he left Fiji, “a happy-go-lucky boy”, and after stints in a supermarket, the sugarworks and on the dole, he returned to the family profession and opened Bob the Barber.
Bob Singh at Bob the Barber, Mokoia Rd.
Bob Singh at Bob the Barber, Mokoia Rd.
He works, he says, seven days until 7pm, alone, based on the advice of his father: “In this game, there is no prime time.” After work, he DJs on a Fijian-Indian radio station.
Since the Warehouse’s closure, he says, trade has dropped, and he describes rent as “a killer”. But he’s confident the burst of apartment-building locally will bring new clients, and has expansive dreams of installing a tattooist and a masseur in the backroom.
“My store,” he says, looking around at the breeze-block walls, “is in the island way, everything is old school.”
Having cut the hair of senior cops, lawyers, footballers and league players, he considers himself to be among the country’s top 10 barbers. This is based on his Facebook page, where he says he has 148 five-star reviews out of 150, giving him a 98 per cent rating (“two fellas give me s…. Opponents, you know?’’). “I love my work. I have pride in my work. I make people look good.”
When you see furniture stores, car dealers, dumpling shops or bike retailers clustered together, it’s because of the law of cumulative attraction: as consumers, we like the idea of comparison shopping across a range of stores in one place.
But AUT’s Megan Phillips says she’s never seen that before with barber shops. “You are just going to get a haircut,” she says.
She thinks a version of cumulative attraction is at work in Birkenhead: if you turn up and one barber is busy, you know you’ll get a cut somewhere. She calls it “reduced risk of uncertainty”.
“People don’t like waiting here,” agrees Dylan Ali, from Ladies and Gents. “It’s different out south. People wait an hour, hour-and-a-half. Here, people wait five minutes and walk out.”
Another theory Phillips suspects is at play is called retail gravitation law, which posits that a greater number of barbers would create a larger pull, perhaps sucking in customers from many kilometres away. And a third is that the shops have, unintentionally, managed to segregate the market between themselves, each striving to offer something different.
Paul Bartolo is a subscriber to that one.
At his shop, Bespoke Barbers and Vintage, he wanted to create something unique, and he knew almost the precise location he wanted. Not in the middle of the shops, competing with the $15-a-cut guys. Not down the hill. Somewhere partway, nestled among the homes of the wealthy of Birkenhead Point, the promontory which juts into the harbour south of the main village.
“I didn’t want guys coming in saying ‘how much d’ya charge for a haircut, mate?’” he says. “‘Oh you’re a bit busy, I’ll go next door’. I wanted them coming in for a specific reason.”
Bartolo at his shop, Bespoke Barbers and Vintage, on Hinemoa St.
Bartolo at his shop, Bespoke Barbers and Vintage, on Hinemoa St.
Bartolo took half the shop next door too, filling it with an esoteric mix of antiquities, from 1930s rugby programmes to champagne jeroboams and old baseball caps. He’d sold some stuff: a signed photo of Peter Fonda, a piece of the sail from the 1995 America’s Cup boat Black Magic, a 1960s tennis racket to a tennis pro, one of those velveteen pictures of a matador, some props to a movie scout. He’d been offered some stuff. One guy came in with a coffin. “Because I’m not a dealer, I don’t know what things are worth, and quite often they want a lot of money,” he says. “What do you pay for a coffin?”
The antiques aren’t really designed to make him money, but to contribute to the highly-cultivated aesthetic he’s aiming for. Fifteen years ago, he says, he couldn’t have done this. “The evolution of barbering, and the way men feel about themselves is where this shop has ended up … it has allowed barbering and design to collide, if you like.”
Bartolo is almost 60, although he looks 40 and dresses with the panache of a younger man; striped T-shirts, colourful bowler hats.
Bartolo is a natty dresser, with a line in sharp headwear.
Bartolo is a natty dresser, with a line in sharp headwear.
He trained at the famous Molton Brown hairdressers in his native London, and ran his first Auckland shop in inner-city Kingsland in the early 90s. Tex-mex, he says: all terracotta tiles and giant cacti in pots (“not sure what I was thinking”). That grew to three shops, then he owned four, with 17 staff, in Melbourne, then came back, owned a couple more, then opened the city-centre Bespoke Barbers, often used in television programmes and advertisements. “For six years, it was everything I could dream of in a barbershop,” he says.
Then Covid came, business dropped 40 per cent and outside on O’Connell St, “you could fire a gun down it … it just evaporated in front of us. The vibe had gone.”
Late last year, he closed up and came here, walking distance from home. Business, he says, is already booming. The previous Saturday he worked non-stop from 9.30am to 4pm without even a cup of tea: 18 haircuts. “You know what? That’s what you’ve got to do.”
Bartolo's shop has a distinctive look: he calls it the "collision" of barbering and design.
Bartolo's shop has a distinctive look: he calls it the "collision" of barbering and design.
He says this with the authority of one who knows a striped pole isn’t enough. On a quiet weekend, he’ll do a leaflet drop with his kids. He sends a weekly email to customers. “You do six months of really hard work to get established. It doesn’t matter what it takes. You just do it. You have to put this amount of energy into it.”
Has he still got the endurance for all that? “More than ever. Age is irrelevant if your body is in shape. It’s your mindset. I can be in the shower in the morning thinking ‘man this is going to be tough’ but by the time 10 o’clock comes, I am set.”
That enthusiasm is borne from a simple belief: “Barbering has to be the best and the coolest job in the world, if you like people,” he says. “It keeps you in the game. Whoever you’re dealing with, you’ve got to be able to converse.” He used to prepare by reading the paper. Now he finds current affairs are on the sex, politics, and religion list. He aims to stay upbeat, with a carefully-cultivated playlist in the background. And he’s reassured, he says, by the fact he’s built something he likes. If other people like it, that’s inspiring.
His cuts, complete with imported Italian shaving cream and Turkish razor blades, are more expensive, but he reckons what he has is different. “And if another two shops opened like this, I would change it. Think Bowie.”
Except there was only one Ziggy Stardust. “They can do it. But they can’t do it. ‘Cos nobody is in the same headspace. This is authentic, because it came out of my brain. If I go copy someone else, I can’t make that work, because it’s not authentic.”
Peak barber has its winners and its losers.
Just before Christmas, Karl Hurcombe heard Paul Bartolo was back in the village. He took a walk down the road, and as soon as he saw the signage going up, he knew Bartolo was back. There’s no malice, and he’s smiling when he says, “I said ‘are you opening up over the road? You’re a bastard’.”
Actually, he didn’t blame Bartolo’s arrival for the demise of his shop, B and M Barbers, even though an unfortunate issue with Trip Advisor, and the single street number between their shops, meant he’d had some people wandering in looking for Bartolo.
Ten minutes into our conversation, a bloke did just that, and Hurcombe issued cheerful directions. One guy realised only when he was in the chair and said Hurcombe may as well carry on. “I said ‘you’ve saved some money’.”
Hurcombe worked for Bartolo about two decades ago, and bought Bartolo’s city-centre shop off him when he left for Australia. He ran it for about a decade, then sold it himself to a bloke who cold-called him and offered about $45,000, twice what he thought it was worth. It paid the deposit on his first home in New Lynn.
In May, Hurcombe’s two-year lease in Birkenhead ran out, and he decided not to renew.
“Such is life...”
It was the uncertainty he couldn’t handle. After the second lockdown, he resolved that a third would finish him. After each, he made his losses back quickly, but trade then flattened and dropped.
Karl Hurcombe is the most cheerful of characters, but work has taken its toll in 2021.
Karl Hurcombe is the most cheerful of characters, but work has taken its toll in 2021.
It was in October last year when things went dead. One day, nobody came in at all. At Christmas, he realised he was 30 per cent down.
Like Bob Singh, he blames the closure of the Warehouse, and the exit of the local ANZ, Kiwibank, BNZ and Post Office branches.
On the last day of April, Hurcombe closed B and M’s doors for the last time. After eight years barbering in the area, he wasn’t ready to walk away completely - mainly because of his regulars, like my 11-year-old son Henry: “I’ve known Henry more years than I care to remember.”
So now he’s renting a chair in the next-door ladies’ salon, which he hoped was a much less stressful set-up. Hurcombe has the sunniest of personalities, but he’d had trouble sleeping in the final few months of trading.
“If I wake up at 3am or 4am, that’s it. I’m awake the rest of the night. It can be little, minor, stupid things, like where shall I take the dog for a walk? Or do I need to charge up the security cameras? Then I get to work, and I think why was I worrying about that at 3am?”
The best evidence for Phillips’ theory that barbering is a growth industry comes from the BarberShop Co.
Kiwis love a franchise business. Conceived only in 2015, this one has already grown to 24 North Island shops. The other Birkenhead barbers, all owner-operators, seemed mildly suspicious of the BarberShop Co.
And Andrew Garrett, the Birkenhead franchisee, freely admits he’s not a barber. He stumbled on the business when looking online for a new barber after the one he used in Newmarket closed down. There was a button at the top of the homepage saying “own your own”. He clicked on it. “Nine times out of 10, people would look at that and say no, but I thought ‘stuff it’, filled in the form, and got a call from the boss.”
Garrett is not a barber, but always wanted his own business.
Garrett is not a barber, but always wanted his own business.
Garrett had just been made redundant from his job as finance business partner at the real estate chain Harcourt’s, and while he’d never cut anyone’s hair (he still hasn’t), he’d always liked the idea of owning his own business. He’d talked for years about maybe doing a cafe, but this seemed low risk, and he understood how franchises worked: “I was realistic with my expectations.”
Trade’s good, he says, and he has no desire to go back to the nine-to-five. He’s just hired a fourth barber (his two man-two woman staff comprise a Kiwi, a Macedonian, a Colombian and an Englishwoman). He has a sunny disinterest in his rivals. “They are competition in that they are cutting hair. I could spend my days worrying about that, or do what we do, and we know that works.” That is, he says, “we make sure that every single client that comes through the door, we aim to exceed their expectations every single time … we can be ridiculously busy and a whole lot of people waiting, but for that 20 minutes, the client is the total focus for that barber”.
Andrew Garrett: "It's a tough job."
Andrew Garrett: "It's a tough job."
It’s a tough job, says Garrett, the outsider on the inside. “It’s not for everyone. You’ve got to be mentally on the ball and on your feet for eight hours. It is hard work, and I think some people probably think it is a bit easy.”
They all agree that’s the secret: people skills. For Paul Bartolo, the barber’s chair is a priest’s confessional. “They want you to know what they want you to know,” he says. “You keep it within the four walls.” He had one man come in who regularly talked about his wife, then about his new girlfriend, then about how he was back with his wife. “It’s a service industry. It’s not just cutting hair.”
And for all of them, it’s what keeps them in the job. “I love it,” says Laurel Hall. “I love the people.”
Last week, there was a post on the local community Facebook page about how one of the village bakeries was closing down. “I wonder what will go there?” wrote one wag. “Another barber shop?”
Why? Because the chaotic start to 2021 has underscored the catastrophic effects of misinformation. Inflammatory rhetoric left unchecked - and amplified across social platforms - has harmed how countries have responded to the pandemic, and has damaged democracy.
Stuff’s ethical reporting is built on accuracy, fairness and balance. With millions of New Zealanders turning to us every day, it’s our mission to make Aotearoa a better place.
But the way journalism is funded is changing and we need your help to sustain local newsrooms.
If Stuff is a regular part of your day, please consider becoming a supporter. You can make a contribution from as little as $1. Be part of our story, and help us tell yours.
Words: Steve Kilgallon
Visuals: Lawrence Smith
Design & layout: Aaron Wood
Editor: John Hartevelt
Built with Shorthand