So as I said in my post about gay hair loss, bears, and mail-order brides, I’ve been doing some security work on the side. Mostly on weekends as a way to get out of the house.
Anyway, I opted to take a job providing extra security at Best Buy on Thanksgiving this year. Time and a half pay. I figured it’d be a good opportunity to observe humanity at its worst, and maybe I’d be able to successfully prove Elon Musk’s theory that we are all indeed just living in a simulation/matrix of some kind.
Oh, the absurdity of existence…
They needed sheep herders, basically. So I was a shepherd/mercenary for a day.
They hired two guards from our security firm. Myself, and another dude, Andy, a bald 55-year-old who resembled Wilford Brimley, the character actor who you’ve never heard of, but whose mustachioed face you’d likely recognize in an instant. He’s perhaps most famous for his roles in “The Natural” and “The Firm.”
The Assignment
They had two tasks for us.
- Monitoring the bathroom – not a whole lot of fun, but they needed to have someone back there because they sure as hell don’t want merchandise going into those disgusting bathrooms.
- Wandering around the store and looking as mean and suspicious as we could look, hopefully deterring some would-be shoplifters in the process.
That’s it. We switched tasks every half hour.
Surprisingly, it was a largely uneventful evening. There was some madness early on, but the crowd certainly wasn’t evening-news worthy, so there was no pushing, shoving, eye-gouging, crotch grabbing a la Kevin Spacey, or anything along those lines.
A couple bald cops were also on-site for the celebration of consumerism.
Without further pomp and circumstance…
My Top Five Black Friday Observations on Baldness
So yeah, I saw a ton of people at Best Buy…Granted, it was Thanksgiving night, but they still sort of consider that a part of the Black Friday extraganza.
- The Best Buy Associates Were Mostly Norwood 1s – Most of these guys were between the ages of 19 and 25, approximately. So it’s not too surprising that the majority of them still had their juvenile hairlines intact. But I think maybe they were a bit more follicly blessed than your average group of young men, most of whom are beginning the hairline maturation process in their late teens or early 20s.
- Female Pattern Baldness is Super Common – Middle-aged and older women are omnipresent on Black Friday, every year. I was surprised at how many of them had female pattern hair loss. Some of them just had the slight, widening part that a lot of women develop as they age. Others had full-on bald spots. One of the associates was thinning everywhere, like the Norwood 5 Mormon woman who I thought was my 4x great grandmother but turned out not to be.
- The Buzz Cut is More Fashionable than Ever – Balding men love buzzing their heads, what can I say!
- The Slick Bald Guys tended to look Sharper than the Buzzed Guys – There is a difference between simply buzzing your head down to a #1 or 2 guard, for example, and shaving your head down to bare skin. The guys who rocked the full Willis style projected more confidence and just seemed more well put-together, in my opinion.
- Fat and Balding Can Work on Some Guys – Look, it’s not advisable for you to become obese and bald. In fact, I’d say fat and bald is one of the five worst looks for balding men. However, some puffy and follicly challenged guys do make it work; they tend to be affable, have big personalities to match their large physiques, and have nice smiles. Once you become obese, truly obese, it’s pretty much impossible to be handsome in the classical sense anyway. Sorry, just being realistic. So hair, or the lack thereof, is probably not going to make a huge difference for you in terms of aesthetics if you are indeed obese. That’s the good news, take it for what it’s worth!
Those are my five observations about baldness, on this Black Friday, 2017. Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.
Robert Price is a writer, consumer advocate, and hair loss researcher with thousands of hours of experience in the field. His goal is to keep you out of the hair loss rabbit hole, underworld, or whatever you want to call it. He founded Hair Loss Daily, the unbiased hair loss blog, in 2016. You can learn more about Robert in the my story section of this website.