Downtown Wilmington, Delaware is a tough place to find a barber shop, but there is a blood donation center on the main commercial street. This spurred a thought: why not offer blood donors a free on-site haircut? That would keep them coming back at approximately the every-three-months interval that is ideal.
A quick Google search does not reveal that this has been tried by any hospital, though the Red Cross has offered coupons for free haircuts to donors willing to make a second appointment and travel to another site.
[Personal anecdote: I have been a blood donor at Boston Children’s hospital for about 20 years. I would like to donate every three months but often it takes me a year to get organized to make an appointment and drive over there. They offer a free T-shirt with every blood donation and the retail value of the T-shirt is only a little less than the retail price of haircuts that I buy. If the phone call and drive effort would yield a haircut I would definitely donate more often.]
Yes, in fact they should give you a haircut *while* you are donating! Time saving alone would make it worth it.
This is a great idea. I’m surprised that this hasn’t been done before. I remember years ago when I worked for DoD the standing policy was two hours of admin leave given for blood donations. The blood bank would usually schedule donations on Friday afternoon. Yes, it encouraged employees to donate blood on a regular basis.
@DaveG several companies for which I work, including current one also encourage blood donation and provide the time and facilities to do it (maybe in concert with the office building/other companies). I think it is a common thing now. I seem to remember a Radiolab episode that covered the thriving and somewhat surprisingly open market for blood with fairly liquid (sorry) pricing
Haircut sounds like a pretty good incentive, unfortunately I am pretty unmotivated to get a regular haircut until it becomes intolerable, and also not allowed to donate blood having been born and spending “more than 5 years in Europe since 1980”
There are some drawbacks:
– Most women and some men prefer to choose a hairstylist or barber, not have one chosen for them.
– For haircut *during or at the same site as* blood donation: It seems like after a haircut bits of hair tend to get into everything. 🙂 This non-sterile debris isn’t the best thing to add to an environment where medical procedures are being done.
They could do the haircut while the blood is being taken, without compromising the cleanliness of the site, by using a flowbee.