Loadingā¦
21
Appreciation post: my 4,000th razor blade catalog entry at the county archive and the weird thing it taught me about 1930s barber shops
I work part time at the county historical archive in Erie, Pennsylvania, mostly scanning and cataloging old business receipts nobody has looked at since the 1970s. Sounds like the most boring job on earth, right? Well last Tuesday I typed entry number 4,000 into the database and it was a 1932 receipt from a barber supply company for 144 razor blades. Four thousand entries in and I finally noticed something I had totally missed the whole time. The barbers in this town were ordering blades in weirdly specific counts, always multiples of twelve, and it turns out that matched the number of chairs in the shop, so they were basically tracking blades per customer per week. I sat there for like 20 minutes doing the math on a scratch pad and figured out the average guy was getting maybe seven shaves out of a single blade before they swapped it. That one number, 4,000, made me go back and re-read a folder I had blown through in a day back in March, and I found a whole pattern in how shops closed and reopened during the Depression. Has anyone else hit a round number at work and suddenly seen a whole story hiding in the stuff you had been skimming past?
2 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In2 Comments
the_joseph3d ago
The seven shaves per blade number is the part that gets me. I read a piece a while back about how barbers during the Depression would strop a blade on leather or even a glass to stretch it longer, so seven uses might actually be on the low end for some shops. There was a guy in Ohio who claimed he could get a blade to last a month that way. The multiples of twelve thing makes total sense too, since a dozen was the standard wholesale unit back then. It is funny how a number like 4,000 makes you slow down and actually look at what you have been scanning past.
7