The Industry Chains Never Really Conquered: Hair Salons and Barbershops, Mapped

Six posts into this dataset's consolidation angle — Kroger's hidden banners, SCI's 158 funeral home names, the fragmented-but-real veterinary chains, even Aldi Nord and Aldi Süd's 65-year-old sibling rivalry — we started to wonder whether we'd just find hidden ownership everywhere we looked. Hair salons and barbershops are the test of that: two of the most personal, walk-in, relationship-driven retail categories that exist, and the common assumption is that they're overwhelmingly independent. This piece exists to check whether that assumption is actually true, or whether it's just what people assume because the consolidation is as well-hidden as SCI's.

It's actually true.

Two different geographies, both dominated by no state in particular

Rank	State	Listings	Per 100k residents
1	Maryland	3,549	56.64
2	Georgia	6,319	55.91
3	Connecticut	1,958	53.08
4	Colorado	3,083	51.28
5	Wisconsin	3,044	50.96
6	North Carolina	5,477	48.91
7	New Hampshire	692	48.89
8	Florida	11,134	47.45
9	Massachusetts	3,358	46.94
10	South Carolina	2,576	46.25
…	(33 states omitted)
44	West Virginia	494	27.97
45	Alaska	203	27.53
46	New Mexico	581	27.33
47	Idaho	530	26.11
48	Utah	849	23.99
49	Arizona	1,772	23.24
50	Hawaii	290	20.24
51	Nevada	653	19.90

Show the full 51-state hair salon ranking

Rank	State	Per 100k residents
1	Maryland	56.64
2	Georgia	55.91
3	Connecticut	53.08
4	Colorado	51.28
5	Wisconsin	50.96
6	North Carolina	48.91
7	New Hampshire	48.89
8	Florida	47.45
9	Massachusetts	46.94
10	South Carolina	46.25
11	Rhode Island	46.21
12	Illinois	45.34
13	New Jersey	45.29
14	Virginia	44.53
15	Alabama	44.31
16	Texas	43.55
17	Iowa	43.39
18	Maine	43.18
19	Pennsylvania	43.14
20	Tennessee	43.09
21	Kansas	43.06
22	North Dakota	42.91
23	Louisiana	42.78
24	Vermont	42.66
25	Michigan	41.36
26	New York	40.20
27	Missouri	39.90
28	Mississippi	39.64
29	Minnesota	39.47
30	Nebraska	39.44
31	Arkansas	39.26
32	Ohio	38.57
33	Indiana	38.53
34	Oklahoma	38.25
35	Delaware	38.11
36	South Dakota	37.86
37	District of Columbia	37.05
38	Washington	35.47
39	Kentucky	34.19
40	Wyoming	32.95
41	Montana	31.89
42	California	31.06
43	Oregon	30.98
44	West Virginia	27.97
45	Alaska	27.53
46	New Mexico	27.33
47	Idaho	26.11
48	Utah	23.99
49	Arizona	23.24
50	Hawaii	20.24
51	Nevada	19.90

Rank	State	Listings	Per 100k residents
1	Rhode Island	444	39.84
2	Connecticut	1,428	38.71
3	Texas	12,209	38.50
4	Florida	8,783	37.43
5	New Jersey	3,415	35.77
6	Louisiana	1,627	35.23
7	New York	7,012	35.06
8	Alabama	1,776	34.20
9	Georgia	3,762	33.28
10	Massachusetts	2,325	32.50
…	(31 states omitted)
42	Oregon	722	16.89
43	Minnesota	982	16.84
44	Wyoming	97	16.48
45	Utah	572	16.16
46	Idaho	317	15.62
47	Nevada	492	14.99
48	South Dakota	137	14.65
49	Alaska	106	14.38
50	Vermont	80	12.41
51	Hawaii	159	11.10

Show the full 51-state barbershop ranking

Rank	State	Per 100k residents
1	Rhode Island	39.84
2	Connecticut	38.71
3	Texas	38.50
4	Florida	37.43
5	New Jersey	35.77
6	Louisiana	35.23
7	New York	35.06
8	Alabama	34.20
9	Georgia	33.28
10	Massachusetts	32.50
11	Mississippi	32.26
12	District of Columbia	31.14
13	Maryland	31.01
14	Pennsylvania	29.97
15	Illinois	29.91
16	Colorado	29.54
17	South Carolina	29.44
18	Arkansas	29.22
19	North Carolina	28.95
20	California	27.87
21	Delaware	27.17
22	Virginia	27.14
23	Kentucky	26.70
24	Oklahoma	26.60
25	New Mexico	26.53
26	Tennessee	26.45
27	Ohio	25.78
28	Kansas	25.26
29	New Hampshire	23.88
30	Missouri	23.70
31	Indiana	22.94
32	Washington	22.87
33	West Virginia	22.76
34	Michigan	22.10
35	Maine	21.70
36	Wisconsin	21.40
37	Iowa	20.29
38	Nebraska	19.82
39	North Dakota	19.64
40	Montana	18.52
41	Arizona	17.35
42	Oregon	16.89
43	Minnesota	16.84
44	Wyoming	16.48
45	Utah	16.16
46	Idaho	15.62
47	Nevada	14.99
48	South Dakota	14.65
49	Alaska	14.38
50	Vermont	12.41
51	Hawaii	11.10

Neither ranking looks like anything else in this series. It isn't the Bible Belt, it isn't rural Farm Belt states, it isn't a Sunbelt-vs-coasts split. Maryland leads hair salons; Rhode Island leads barbershops; five states (Connecticut, Texas, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts) place in the top 10 of both, but the overall shape of each list is different enough that we don't see an obvious single story to tell about why — which itself is a useful negative result. When a category's density pattern doesn't obviously track religion, age, rurality, or region, that's evidence the category isn't being driven by the same demographic or structural forces that shaped every other ranking in this series.

Trying to prove chain dominance, and mostly failing

Given how every other post in this series turned up real, provable consolidation once we looked past the obvious brand names, we ran the identical test here. First, the naive brand search — and it broke the same way "Dignity Memorial" and "ALDI Nord" did:

What we tried	What went wrong
q='Great Clips' + category=hair_salon	5,432 raw hits, but a 10-record sample was only 50% genuine — 'Sport Clips' (a different company) matched on the shared word 'Clips,' and independent shops like 'A Great Hairdresser' matched on the shared word 'Great'

We fixed it the same way we fixed SCI and Thrive Pet Healthcare: pull a large, deduplicated, recency-sorted sample and classify every record by its actual website domain, not by text-matching the name.

Chain	Share of a 500-record sample
Great Clips	4.0%
Sport Clips	2.8%
Supercuts	1.2%
SmartStyle	0.6%
Cost Cutters	0.2%
JCPenney Salon	0.2%
Total identifiable chain	9.0%
Independent / unidentified	91.0%

Chain	Share of a 300-record sample
Supercuts (hair-salon chain, also tagged barber_shop in some locations)	1.3%
Sport Clips (same caveat)	1.0%
SmartStyle (same caveat)	0.3%
Total identifiable chain	2.7%
Independent / unidentified	97.3%

SCI (funeral homes, single company)15.8%

our funeral home piece

Vet clinics (5 chains combined)9.2%

our veterinary piece

Hair salons (6 chains combined)9.0%

this piece

Barbershops (chain bleed-over only)2.7%

this piece

That's a real, meaningful contrast with everything else in this series. Hair salons land close to veterinary clinics (9.0% vs. 9.2%) — both fragmented across several mid-sized players with no single dominant giant. Barbershops sit in a category of their own: what little "chain" signal exists isn't even a barbershop-specific chain, it's overflow from hair-salon brands that happen to also serve men's cuts in some locations. We looked for a dedicated barbershop chain (Roosters, Floyd's 99 Barbershop, V's Barbershop) and found zero hits for any of them in our sample — not proof they don't exist anywhere in the country, but strong evidence none of them have meaningfully broken into national scale the way Great Clips or Supercuts have for salons.

How we did this, and the caveats

Every number above comes from a live search/facets call against Crawlora's Google Maps business dataset, 2026-08-26 snapshot, cross-referenced against US Census Bureau Vintage 2025 (July 1, 2025) state population estimates.

Caveats worth stating plainly: these are sample-based estimates, not exhaustive counts — we did not classify all 140,523 + 99,384 listings individually. A chain we didn't think to check for wouldn't show up — we tested the brands we could name from general knowledge of the industry, not an exhaustive list; a genuinely obscure regional chain with a shared-but-unlabeled website could theoretically be hiding in the "independent" bucket the same way SCI hid in funeral homes, though the repeated-domain check (which caught SCI, Thrive, and every other hidden chain in this series) found nothing of the kind here. This measures physical locations, not revenue or customer volume — a 9% share of listings doesn't necessarily mean a 9% share of haircuts, since chain locations may see more or fewer customers on average than independents. And as with every piece on this dataset: it's live-growing, so a re-pull months from now will show different totals.

If you want to run your own consolidation or density checks on this data, that's exactly what Crawlora's Google Maps business API is for — the same structured-data approach behind our funeral home, veterinary, and Aldi/Lidl Europe consolidation studies.

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