Not quite the same, it’s becoming more common for some services to charge a fee for non attendance. My GP is one, dentist another however it’s a lesser value than an appointment might cost. It’s also discretionary and allows a change or cancellation up until several hours before or the day before for the other.
Hopefully the hair stylists are not all trend setters.
Yes, it’s not new for the medical profession to require a certain time frame for cancellations of appointments or a fee may be charged. But I wonder when a glorified barber got to be on par with the medical profession and even be one step ahead of them in requiring deposits which can be lost on the second rescheduling?
If it’s a matter of getting special equipments or colours or whatever, then it should be clearly explained as an exception which requires a special method of payment. But it should not be standard as it’s just taking advantage of people who might fall for the hype.
I think this comment about hits the nail on the head. In a free society, you and everybody else has a total right to do what they want, provided that they do it openly and above board. People can boycott businesses; businesses can boycott customers. And that, as it happens, exactly what just about all businesses do.
Oh, just as do customers, they dress their boycott up in fancy clothes - making it seem like something helpful. Just as customers dress up their bad opinions about businesses in terms of “I am just trying to be helpful”, so too do businesses. “I close every Sunday, for the whole of the day, and any customers who want to visit me will just have to miss out. Of course that has nothing whatsoever to do with me taking a rest, or that opening on Sunday just costs me money because hardly any customers turn up. No; this is entirely for my cusomers’ benefits; it is entirely so that they can go to church, or otherwise spend quality time with their families”.
I am sure that there are businesses that have a moral obligation to be available to anyone who wants them, any time they are wanted, under whatever conditions that the customers may dream up… I am sure that this is so… but I cannot think who this might be.
In the meantime, everybody can enjoy the freedom to boycott everybody they don’t like, or who wants to do business in an unacceptable way - both customers AND businesses. If you don’t like the way a business is doing business, just realise: that’s just its little friendly way of boycotting you, and telling you to go take a running jump. So don’t get mad; don’t complain and whinge. Instead, celebrate your freedom to say no to a business when you choose. Remember, you do not have to buy from a business even if it wants you to.
“Death and Taxes”?
There are always exceptions. 
For consumers living in the not so urban centred regions of Australia some may have decided on a more than symbolic boycott. Of course many of us live where we live because that is where we find the work or lifestyle that most meets our needs. Exercising the freedom to not buy petrol, from the only local outlet impractical? Boycotting the last bank to shut up shop and leave town (or the one about to) futile? Although you may feel better if you have returned the favour by changing banks to the other one that has also left town years before.
It’s a fine line between choosing a local business and not having one at all. The alternative may be 5-10km distant, or often in our location 30km on the Highway. I save up getting a polish and hair cut for just such occasions. The local hairdresser has plenty of friendly staff and they are cheap. Perhaps if I was after a pony tail finish or mullet their skill set would be perfect. Not so my head. Fortunately they have a busy salon and are unlikely to miss my occasional custom.
That is true… and it is also a fine line between asking a business for services that it ought - morally or legally - provide, and just being old-fashioned demanding and needy. A ‘needy’ person in a huge metroplitan shopping centre, or on the apparently limitless global Internet, demands every business provide every possible service or facility; in the bush, where it seems that you live, the ‘needy’ person would complain if the business they wanted did not instantly relocate itself to within easy walking distance - or maybe right into their personal kitchen.
Talking to hair salons about their customers in big shopping areas, as I have done for many decades, I have been struck by just how complaining some people can be. One salon, many years ago, began offering extremely cheap - almost free - haircuts to pensioners on Thursdays… which immediately resulted in a handful of complaints that that they weren’t offering them every other day too!
Another point, which seems to have been missed entirely in the earlier discussion, is that for folks in service industries, the only thing they have to sell is their time. So when somebody books an appointment, they are quite literally booking a portion of the worker’s stock in trade - and not unreasonably, they can be asked to pay for it in advance. Consider how folks with regular jobs would feel if their boss could suspend or cancel their jobs with no notice - and how aggrieved they would feel if their boss then dismissed their financial pain by saying, “Oh they can get easily a replacement job for that cancelled hour or day”.
In the end, any business that tries to provide every possible service that anybody in the world may dream up will soon go out of business. And then the line between being able to choose a local business and not having one at all will become, for the bulk of customers - the flexible, non-needy ones - exceedingly thin.
To hammer the point, this site is called ‘Choice’, and not ‘Right’, for a reason: we can choose what is put on offer to us, but we have no right to demand that other people offer us what they don’t want to offer. That right is quite properly reserved to Parliament and the law courts. Elsewhere, it is called extortion - even if it dressed up as gratuitous friendly business advice.
