Your barber has been watching your whole life. That is not a haircut.

A hundred thousand people watched my barbershop video in a single day. I have been doing this long enough to know what the comments will look like before I read them. But this batch was different.

Barbers got in touch. Not to talk about the money or the margins or the business rates. They wrote to tell me that a barbershop chair is the only place in a man's month where someone asks him how he is doing and then actually waits for the answer. Twenty minutes. No agenda. No clock ticking on someone else's behalf. Just the question.

That point hit me harder than I expected, because it is true and I had not said it plainly enough. Think about the week you have just had. How many times did someone sit across from you, or stand behind you, and say: how is your life going? Not your project. Not your quarterly numbers. Your life.

The barber is the person who watched you come in nervous before your first proper job interview. Who asked about the girl you mentioned three visits ago. Who knew before most of your friends that you were going to be a dad, because you came in looking like you had not slept and you needed to tell someone. That is not a transaction. That is something closer to a witness.

It is the same pattern across the high street, once you start looking. The corner shop where someone noticed you had not been in for a fortnight. The butcher who remembers your mum prefers the shoulder not the leg. These places are not just selling you a product. They are paying attention to your life in a way that a self-checkout machine and a loyalty points scheme will never replicate.

Chains are built to scale. Scaling means standardising. Standardising means the conversation gets removed because the conversation cannot be made consistent across eight hundred sites. So it goes. And with it goes the thing that the comments reminded me exists: the twenty minutes where a man can open up in a barber's chair and nobody thinks anything of it.

That is worth something. It is worth more than most of us are accounting for when we decide where to spend a Saturday morning.

If you know an independent that does more than its job title suggests, submit their story at keepthemopen.com.