Coronavirus: Barber takes over 1000 bookings, back-to-back for weeks

A New Zealand barber has taken over 1000 bookings since Monday afternoon, with 30 minute slots stacked for the next fortnight.

Boar and Blade owner Hohepa Rutene planned to extend hours across his three outlets in Wellington and Auckland, with the number of barbers on the floor halved. Operational details were still coming in to fruition ahead of the shift to alert level 2 tomorrow, he said.

"At around 6pm [Monday] I re-opened our bookings. We had about 700-800 people book in with another 200 [on Tuesday] morning – that's amazing and a massive thanks to our amazing customers for that," Rutene said.

By Wednesday morning he had well over 1000 line up with no free slots till the end of the month.

In a normal, pre lockdown day, Rutene's three barber shops would get through about 110 clients, he said. In the weeks ahead, they will see a third of that due to alert level 2 changes, so about 74 people a day.

"For the next three weeks at least we are pretty much at 90 per cent capacity and will be opening ourselves up to work extra hours to deal with the influx of clients."

Clients inside the usually intimate Boar and Blade will sit two seats apart and the booking system will help with contact tracing if need be, Rutene said.

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