How To Be A Barber

UK Riots: Website Raises £25k to Help 89-Year-Old Barber

A London barber whose shop was ransacked by looters has re-opened after an Internet campaign raised more than £25,000 to help him back on his feet.

Aaron Biber, 89, has for more than 40 years run his barber shop in the north London district of Tottenham, the first to be hit by the riots that gripped the city this week.

The campaign was the idea of three interns, Bjorn Conradi, 23, Sophie Browness, 21 and Omid Sard, 28 working at BBH, a London advertising agency.

Mr. Conradi, who moved to the U.K. from Amsterdam two years ago, said the idea came from his girlfriend who told him about Mr. Biber’s plight. “It was heartbreaking. This was an opportunity to help this man who was going to lose his livelihood.

“The big issue we also wanted to highlight was there was a lot of talk about social media enabling these riots. We wanted to show that young people and social media can also do a lot of good things.

“The success we have had is a very big statement about the power of social media.”

Mr. Conradi said he had spoken to Mr. Biber, who lost his wife last year, and said he was “overwhelmed” by the generosity. Should Mr. Biber not need all the money, Mr. Conradi said they will discuss with him how to use the fund to help the Tottenham community.

Mr. Biber’s plight became a world-wide phenomenon. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz Mr. Biber recounted previous violence on London’s streets.

Biber has experience of rioting of course; he was in Cable Street in 1936—not that anyone would call that a riot nowadays. In two months, London will commemorate a different age in which gangs and police fought it out on the city’s street for a much nobler purpose than simply looting shops of wide-screen televisions. October 4 will be the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street.

Aaron Biber remembers that period well, when Britain experienced its own version of Hitlerism, in the shape of Sir Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists.

“The Blackshirts used to have rallies in Victoria Park and I went to hear Mosley speak,” he says. “My mother said to me, ‘They hate Jews; they’ll kill you,’ but I had a razor in my pocket.”

Aaron wrote:

Inspiring. That guy is so smooth, with his “ohhh you’re married to a policeman, right?” line.

Actually I thought that was awful that the interns seemed not to have made it clearto Mr Biber who they were. What had they said to lead Mr Biber to think they were connected to the local police? Is that even legal to mislead someone into thinking you are the police by association? In reality they were from an advertising agency and with a commercial purpose of their own. What they were doing is generating good PR about social media because the UK government’s home secretary is meeting with telecommunications companies because it may decide it needs greater powers over new broadcast media which BBH’;s clients will not want and nor will BBH. I understood from mainstream media reports that Mr Biber’s family replaced his window and door. It will be the local community that will make the real difference to Mr Biber’s well being going forward in my view, not BBH. I don;t think he needs social media, I think it is the other way around, social media needs him for PR purposes.

UNPROFESSIONAL BARBERS, HOW TO BECOME A ...

That true it a profession and not a hustle.. Sometime people would rather go to a barber shop/salon franchise instead of a barber shop even though they will properly not get a so good haircut. The thing is that these franchise know that there barber shops that lack in customers service and thrive on barber shops that fail in that department. Wake up Barber’s and start acting like a professional

there is a lot of unprofessional barbers in shop… i really wish alex would of mention barbers arguing ova walk-ins right in front of them… some barbers just dont know how petty and broke dat makes u look… another thing is hating on your co-worker cause he has more clientel and is making more money….

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