SportClips Sucks

ESPN.com presented me a SportClips ad this morning, which is almost as annoying as seeing the latest Budweiser ad in which a grown man has a romantic relationship with a Clydesdale (while we listen whistfully to Landslide by Fleetwood Mac. Note to SNL – this ad is a skit 99% pre-written.)

Putting aside for a moment the fact that SportClips is pandering — in concept — to fear of homosexuality, the service itself is annoying. You can’t get in line without enduring a questionnaire designed to bury you in SportClips marketing. They’ll ask everything but your blood type, which they should probably know because you very well might suffer a head injury with their club fisted “stylists”. And before you can pay and leave, you’ll be reminded that you should get a haircut every other week. What kind of person gets that many haircuts? And they will, of course, try to sell you about thousand different kinds of hair products. In short, SportClips would like you spend a lot of time and money on your hair, which is ironic, because the concept they promote is the opposite. They offer the haircut with no girlie frills, an easy get in and get out. That’s how men like it, right?

But about the concept, they all look like a cross between a sports bar and locker room. ESPN is on everywhere and the “stylists” are dressed like FootLocker employees. Now, maybe I’ve seen too many films about locker room “romances” and maybe I’m oversensitive to women wetting my head and massaging my scalp and leaning over me with partially exposed breasts with a potentially lethal weapon, but I’d prefer to not be watching a hockey game while it happens. I’d like it to be quiet, and if the woman cutting my hair is going to wear a uniform, I’d prefer it be something less butch. Laker Girl would be fine, if I had to choose a sports theme. Or maybe a Birmingham Phillie (USFL Cheerleader in sateen with smokin’ 80s hair). This isn’t to pass judgement on the man who’d like to have his hair done by Ed Hochuli. If that’s your thing, god bless, as Tony Soprano liked to say. All I’m saying is that a haircut, like all other goods and services, is best had in privately owned business, not a cookie cutter franchise, and there is no need to garb the whole experience in jock denial. A man walks into a beauty salon filled with perfume, manicurists, Elle and O magazines in the waiting area and owns it and then that same man walks out with a good haircut.