I'd love to go to the hairdresser...
It's a little bit like just before Christmas: unexpectedly, there are only a few days left until the festivities, and you haven't thought about getting presents yet, to which everyone has said in advance 'this year we're not getting anything for ourselves, people are starving elsewhere, so let's donate to the organisations that make us aware of that'.
The only difference is that the money you spend at the hairdresser's goes to another good cause, namely not to frighten your fellow human beings with the sight of you, as is the case with cute Tasmanian devils who suddenly stand up and show their teeth. Sure, I can cut my own hair if need be, but the result threatens to look even worse than simply letting the chaps sprout.
I have to think of the owner of the chip shop who is wondering whether he can at least keep his shop open for out-of-home sales. He can't just skip the rent, the electricity for the refrigeration and the maintenance of the equipment; it's bad enough that his employees have to stay at home, because he doesn't get billions in aid that the managers stuff into their pockets (the short-time workers can watch how they get along with 59% of the salary, then they'll already learn what's in store for them when they become unemployed).
The lost income in relation to the costs, not counting his own working hours of course ... so he can just about manage not to take down the dusty 'Temporary help wanted' in a fortnight and auction it off for the highest bid on ebay because his shop will remain closed forever.
So is 'letting it grow' the most humane solution?
I wonder how the small hairdressing businesses are doing analogously. I have seen hairdressers with colds in the past who worked with protective masks so as not to infect the customers. Whose protection is currently in the foreground; that of the customers or the hairdressers; is hair contagious? In the supermarket or the tram, a distance of 1.5 m cannot be maintained; does holding one's breath until the bacillus-spreading seat neighbour gets out help? If I had known that all service providers would close their doors indefinitely, I would have left a week earlier when I didn't really need to, but now it's too late to regret the postponed decision.
Hairdresser - the crisis-proof profession
Ha, my ass. As a child faced with the choice of becoming an astronaut, a football player, a rock star or a fireman, I kept hearing that hairdressing was a crisis-proof profession ... and now we have a crisis and all the hairdressers are closed. Not even the clever Basic Law makers had such a thing on their minds in 1948. It took until the grand coalition of 1968 for emergency laws to be included in the Basic Law at all. For a long time, the SPD and the trade unions resisted depriving people of their basic rights, and it was only enough to cover the case of defence, natural disasters and uprisings, as well as to insert the clause of constitutional appeal; an impending wave of colds was not a scenario that could have been imagined so dramatically.
Is it that dramatic?
Many politicians have underestimated the seriousness (within two months, an infection rate of 0.000025 % of the population has become 0.00025, exponentially extrapolated, 250 percent of the population will be infected in two years, unfortunately these are not the pandemic proportions that justify curfews and shop closures), others have been ranting for years to declare a state of emergency - but unfortunately this is not possible, because the spread of a virus is not a defence case and neither a catastrophe nor a riot. It could come to that, however, if the hairdressing salons remain closed and more and more people walk around with wild hair, because no one can forbid us to take a walk in the fresh air. We can only hope that the long-haired stay at home voluntarily and do not frighten people, as the government's unclear claims, which change hourly, already do enough.