Recently, I talked about the funny names German haircutters give their shops, e.g. “haarspalterei”, “haargenau”, “haarklein”, “haarscharf” (wordplays with the word hair) with some friends. We continued our discussion about unisex, which uses an uncommon slogan for a haircutter “S**, Luxus und ein geiler Haarschnitt.” (“s**, luxury and a horny/cool haircut.”). The slogan made me remember that I noticed a growing number of luxury haircutters in Mannheim.

Also, I remembered the advent of very cheap haircutters some years ago. It seems service diversification in this handcraft has extended the number of choices for customers, from very cheap to luxury high-class haircutting. But how do I choose the right haircutter for me? (If I wanted to, I already chose my favorite many years ago. Risk avoidance and inertia!)

Is there only the willingness to pay for that service or is there any economic optimum? And how to find it if there is any?

The best approach I can come up with is pretty simple. Costs is not the only factor to consider, but other facors that represent the quality of the haircutter. Maybe there is more but I am pretty good with finding an optimal Quality per Price ratio haircutter that offers its service within the margins of my willingness to pay. So, how to determine the quality level of a haircutter?

I can see 2 approaches of which I prefer the less pricy one 🙂 First one is testing potential haircutting candidates by just making an appointment and having your hair cut. This sure can get expensive if there are many hair cutters in your city (I found hundreds in Mannheim).

Second approach is to use crowdsourcing. There are multiple rating and reviewing websites out there (qype, yelp, ciao, … you name it) that can serve as a source for determining the quality level. A good approach is to gather all star-ratings from select rating websites, convert them into percentage ratings (e.g. 5/10 stars = 50%) and calculate the average rating in percent.

Now, to sum up this decision process:
– Choose some haircutters in your area that provide reasonable prices (reasonable to you, check the haircutter’s website to find the pricing or just call them up)
– Aggregate the ratings to a total rating value in percent
– Calculate the  overall ratio total rating per costs
– Pick the best one and you are good to get your hair cut!!!

It’s a little effort but makes every homo economicus pretty happy when he finds an (economically) optimal haircutter.

Let me advise you that I found choosing the haircutter by sympathy to be my personal approach to find an optimal ratio haircutter 🙂