Kare... Really!?

this is about my recent experience with some of the salons in the city, n they belong to CavinKare groups.

a Sunday noon n with 'v' visiting me over the week coming, i thought it was high time i got to do something about my messy hair.

Green Trends, the Unisex Spa & Salon, the CavinKare group companies, just half a km away from home, thought it may be a right place to try it out. i had visited them before several times for relatively smaller services n was satisfied with this lady who used to attend me. though i knew that they cost double for just a simple threading compared to the normal salons, i felt its ok. cuz i found the place to be pretty spacious. cleanliness is ok, i wouldn't say it is great, they don't keep mopping the floor or whatever, particularly the manicure/pedicure room inside - no comments about it.

being a Sunday noon, the salon hardly had customers. the moment i entered and asked them for a straightening, there were a bunch of gals around me, recommending me to go for rebonding.

For me all that matters then was the cost. A simple straightening costs around 3k plus tax (for medium hair), 2.5k plus tax (for short hair) and rebonding was like 3.5 + tax for short and 4.5+ tax for medium.

there was a female who does the receptionist + service work there and she went on stressing me to go for rebonding and that would give me less post process maintenance efforts. i did not really want to spend so much over it. and after a few mins of calls, discussions with friends etc i decided to go for straightening.

moreover, the length of my hair then was just an inch or 2 down the shoulders and they strictly told that they would consider it as medium length. half minded the service person started with the work, the first wash n now again she told me to go for rebonding. i asked her then that case consider it as short, i ll go for it and not medium.
having a razor cut already my hair was dense only on the top layer. she said she will trim it a bit and so they would consider it as short. i agreed n my so-called medium length became short with just less than half an inch of trimming.

the receptionist was not 'for' this infact and the attender spoke to the person on phone who is like the supervisor there i guess. I thought of the phone conversation what it must have been like and I'm sure this is the word of the attender "Rebonding short is still a profit for us compared to Straightening medium, almost around 500 bucks". the receptionist still kept cribbing over that lady for nodding to this whole deal of small-medium thingie and that's a different story.

after that she went on n the whole process took a whopping 6+ hrs to get over. but after all that, at the end i was happy with the way they've done it. its almost 2+ months now and still the texture is maintained. with straightening i don't think it lasts this long. the main difference that they say between straightening and rebonding is that the latter is a 5 step process with 2 extra creams being used. they use something called 'finisher' at the end which settles down all the minutest hairs that usually pop up and make it look ugly, particularly during travel or even after a small drive for that matter.

the best part was they said they will give a hair spa free after the first wash. and ya.. the first wash comes for free as well. whatever smallest amount of math brain that I have started calculating then, that a hair spa would cost anywhere around 750-1000. so if I'm paying 4K, it works out to almost around 3+ with the complimentary. but only after I went for the first wash I realized what they meant by hair spa. this lady first washed my hair applied a conditioner and washed it. then she brought a potful of cream and she applied that, left it for 20 mins and that's it the spa is over. how bloody cheating!! Did I ever ask for it!? so this is the effect.

this is one part of the story.

next comes limelite. I've seen an outlet in Jaynagar 5th block. but never felt like trying it out. it looked more like an art gallery rather than a salon for me. i must say Green Trends that case is better by looks, they have the decent posters, banners or whatsoever, which make us realize 'ok this is a salon which I can enter with some good feel and come out without it being spoilt'. when I got my rebonding done, i was meanwhile enquiring about Limelite cuz its again a CavinKare Group of companies. the guy there told me that its an executive parlour, when I asked the difference he told me 'the rebonding that costs 4K here would cost 8K there'.. darn.. what a lovely explanation that a supposedly Marketing person could utter!!

another thing is that, the newly arrived Barclay-Times credit card came along with 5k gift vouchers which could be used at different outlets most of which were carrying off of different %. one of them were limelite. i had a 250 bucks limelite voucher, now that i can work out something with that, I decided to venture there over a weekend.

went for a bleach which cost a damn 325 bucks.

the point is, i was told that its an executive parlor but i literally had to search for executives there, not in numbers but by carriage. the hair cuts all happen in the ground floor and they have every variety of human kind dumped in like what we see in internet cafes, there is not even a screen placed between two couches. thankfully i was put in a room, where the inside furnishing was decent, completely made of wood. the flooring, the walls, the cot and dark brown varnish on them was an added beauty. the attender was not at all friendly! again language problem. i just left it to her, let her do whatever experiments she wanted to do from her childhood. outcome was not all that effective. but i was happy she did not spoil my face at the least.

things that dug my heel:

1. suggest me what is good and what is not, you may tell me the benefits of going for a particular service probably twice and that is also for you to have the satisfaction that you have done your job. this is the true meaning of "stakeholder's delight" that you talk about in my pov.

2. why do you have to go on telling me to go for the one which I have decided once that I'm not gonna go for it. the problem comes when this particular thing which you suggest is of higher cost! I only tend to think that you are simply greedy and making business out of me. ok.. That too is not a problem with me unless until you make such strong statements on consumer benefits.

3. needless to say the cheating part. spoiling the brand name. I agreed for something and if you are not happy with it, just tell me it doesnt work this way. what non sense! you tell me something and not do it. better they take care of the people whom they post at such important positions! otherwise you stand too good a chance to get your brand name spoilt overnight!!

4. the beauticians there are not that great! somewhere close to the mark, but not there absolutely. i have seen a couple of people who runs their own and do a fairly good job. 1st and foremost thing: they don't speak English. and even if they speak its pathetic! the lady who attends me can talk tamil, so i'm saved.

CavinKare.. they do so much of branding, have the highest ever pricelist, talk so much about quality and quantity, but things just stop with words is what I could observe.
they don't get quality people to work for them, the plain reason I could imagine is the pay that they should offer to hire people of such grades. stingy guys!Both Green trends and Limelite need to improve a lot infrastructure wise. cleanliness is ok compared to the other local/non-branded ones, but its in no way upto the mark.
price, as one of the points above suggest, just 1:2 ratio, but this 1 here indicates somewhere close to 10.

And if we have to pick the better one out of the two, I would say its Green Trends and not Limelite definitely.