Word: haircut
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...afford taxi fare to the airport, let alone a plane ticket. You could always get your parents to pay for a trip home, but who wants to be subjected to a week-long barrage of "What are you doing with your life? Why don't you get a haircut?" sermons from relatives...
...competitors agree. Suddenly hypermarkets, which can cover five football fields, are springing up across the U.S. in places as diverse as New Orleans and Kalispell, Mont. The oversize stores provide the ultimate in one- stop shopping: customers can get a haircut, buy a refrigerator and stock up on paper towels in one trip. Most "malls without walls," as Walton calls them, draw crowds with an old-fashioned lure: everyday discounts. Prices are reduced as much as 40% below the full retail level. Hypermarkets make money even at such thin profit margins because they sell such an enormous volume of goods...
With the written word proven a failure, primitive people were now forced to develop the power of speech in order to communicate to each other when they needed something like a haircut or a dog. Yet as we progressed evolutionarily, human communication needs also expanded--going from "I need a hair cut" to "I need to devote my entire life to analyzing the true meaning of certain paintings...oh, and also give me a haircut while you're here...
Just then, a visitor walks in, a chubby man with the kind of short, wire- brush haircut that has been out so long it is back in again in certain regions of New York City and Los Angeles. He is Ray Judd, a colleague from the days when the concrete business was populated by honorable men. "Ray had a place up near Luray, but we didn't used to compete," Harper reminisces. "We even traded molds. Nowadays the competition won't even tell you where they buy theirs. I think it's time to get out of this business...
...With a haircut, a couple of breath mints, and wearing its job-hunting clothes, this bluesy ramble about being down but not quite out in Texas might pass as the loosest-jointed novel in years. As things are, call it a collection of related stories, some short, some tall, and some too lackadaisical to stand up and be measured. Good stuff, anyway, whose major virtue is that it is extraordinarily lifelike. Which is to say, messy, disorganized, contrary, repetitious, tacky, funny, if you are in the mood for that sort of thing -- and in need of laundering...