That old barber chair weight stat from 1920 still blows my mind

I looked up the Koken casting catalog from last week and found their original $85 chairs weighed 412 pounds with the cast iron base, and I keep thinking how we now charge $40 for a haircut in the same time it took them to wrestle a guy into that thing, anyone else ever dig into old equipment specs?

1 comments

1 Comment

ward.fiona1d ago

412 pounds for an $85 chair" is wild when you think about the labor side too. Did the barber have to bolt that thing to the floor, or did the weight alone keep it from tipping when some big guy leaned back? I mean, I get why they used cast iron, but hauling that up a flight of stairs to a second floor shop must've been a whole different job. And what did they do for the chairs that were too heavy for the floor joists? That's the part I keep circling back to, the practical stuff nobody writes down in the catalogs.