Florida’s beauty salons, gyms and bars not included in Phase 1 and there’s a reason for that

Jacksonville, Fla. — Your much needed haircut will need to wait, at least for now, unless you want to do it yourself.

Hair salons, barbershops, bars and gyms are not included in Phase 1 of reopening Florida.

Viewer Glenda asked Action News Jax, “what is the difference in opening a dining place and hair salon? It seems they can control the number of people better than a dining place.”

On Thursday, Mayor Lenny Curry referred to places like beauty salons as businesses that require “prolonged person-to-person contact” making social distancing difficult.

“When I spoke to physicians and hospital leaders in recent days about a re-opening and we talked about restaurants, their concern was as we were on this downward trend at least for the short term, how do you socially distance?” Curry said.

Restaurants and retailers that reopen on Monday will need to adhere to a 25% capacity limit.

But what about businesses like Four Friends Fitness, we first introduced you to it on Wednesday.

It’s an appointment-only studio, with a four-person maximum for each session.

“The facility is a little over 1,000 square feet so there’s plenty of room to social distance inside,” said owner Keena Lampkins.

Action News Jax asked Curry if there could be an exception for this boutique-style gym and others like it.

“We’re a city of 1 million people, the ability to take that information and process it, it would just not, it’s not efficient and it wouldn’t be possible,” Curry said.

Lampkins said it’s frustrating.

“I don’t think it’s fair to lump us in with a bigger box gyms that have huge memberships,” said Lampkins.

She hopes that in the future, government leaders take the time to differentiate between businesses.

“Maybe some more questioning on the front end when we open in the licensing process to find out the capacity and get those numbers so that we’ll have details at times like this,” she said.

Mayor Curry said Jacksonville is headed in the right direction on the curve so that means they could explore additional re-openings in “short order”.

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