CLEVELAND — After a nearly two-month hiatus, hair salons and barbershops opened up all over Ohio.
“It feels good to have energy and to have a goal and to really be able to make a plan,” said The Salon owner Rachelle Yarnell.
Yarnell’s employees were wearing the state-required masks and she was urging customers to wear them as well. After each customer, stylists sanitized their chairs and equipment before putting a card on the chair showing that it had been cleaned.
Each of her three salons also took breaks in the middle of the day between shifts to clean the whole salon one additional time.
“I was so pumped up this morning,” Yarnell said.
The excitement in her voice was noticeably absent when News 5 first spoke with her on March 18. Earlier that day, she found out that Gov. Mike DeWine announced that salons would have to close at the end of that business day with no date to reopen.
“When you have no idea how long that will be, how can you predict if you will make it,” Yarnell said in March.
That night, she and her stylists frantically called clients, trying to squeeze them in before they went home. Yarnell said they were cutting hair until 11:30 pm before she connected her employees with help to file for unemployment.
The chorus of blow-dryers, clippers and shampoo stations show Yarnell’s business survived the nearly two-month, uninvited break.
See News 5's coverage of how Yarnell prepared to reopen here.
“These last seven to eight weeks, you lived every day one day at a time,” Yarnell said.
The first month was especially hard for employees like Stylist Shannon Corgan.
“The first four weeks, I didn’t get any income,” Corgan said. “It was a little nerve-wracking because you think, ‘How long will this last?' and there’s so much uncertainty about everything.”
But Corgan and most of Yarnell’s other employees were the lucky ones, eventually getting unemployment and then getting additional money from the Paycheck Protection Program.
“It was almost like I had not left from work,” Corgan said.
Now that Corgan and her coworkers are back, every other chair is empty to keep proper distancing. The mandatory masks might be uncomfortable but it’s a small price to pay to end the uncertainty Yarnell found herself in the middle of two months ago.
“It’s following the guidelines, because the guidelines let me be able to make an income,” Yarnell said.
