Salons take a bitter cut

Even before Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered all New York salons closed indefinitely Friday, local shop owners were getting nailed by the coronavirus crisis.

“I’ve been here all day, I’ve had one customer — 7:30 to 1and I’ve had one customer,” Mike Yusupov, a barber at 7 Hanover Square Barber Shop said just hours before the shutdown was announced on Friday.

“Everyone is afraid of the virus,” he lamented.

Nelly’s Hair and Nail Salon was already closed upstairs. So was the highend Seagull Salon in the West Village.

Before Cuomo’s announcement, Seagull’s goal was to re-open by March 30 with extra air-purifiers, masks for clients and stylists, special cleaning of stations between uses and reduced appointments to limit traffic.

“That was our goal. Now we’ll have to wait and see. It’s certainly disruptive to the industry as a whole,” co-owner Shaun “Surething” Cottle told The News Friday, after the governor’s order.

“I’m confident we’ll be able to stay in business. We have that kind of loyal clientele. People are actually supporting us by buying gift certificates online so we can keep the basics paid for until we can open again,” he said.

“What I believe about New York is that in times of crisis, everyone has played nice, including landlords and the government in terms of rent deferment and relief packages,” he said. “As long as we remain the strong New York City we’ve always been, we’ll be fine. That’s my plan.”

The owner of Delaj Salon in the Bronx’s Kingsbridge neighborhood wasn’t so optimistic.

“Forget week by week, we’re taking it day by day,” owner Sokol Delaj said. “It looks very scary.”

Cuomo’s order requires all barbershops, hair and nail salons, tattoo parlors and piercing shops to close indefinitely starting at 8 p.m. Saturday.

The order is the latest effort to stop state residents from interacting in close quarters and spreading the highly contagious coronavirus.

One salon in the Financial District didn’t even wait for Cuomo’s order to pull the plug. The 18/8 Fine Men’s Salons on Pine St. had decided by Thursday it was shutting permanently.

“If we’re not able to perform our services, the boss is like ‘I can’t see how I’m going to be able to survive months of being out of business,’”