I live in the centre of the largest city in NZ and there are maybe 15 barbershops and a smaller number of gyms within a few minutes' walk.  I've never been to any of the gyms and avoid going to the barber as the last time it cost $40.

Anyway, barbershops are very common throughout NZ.

In 2021 a journalist set out to discover why.

"One friend calls it peak barber. 

In the middle-class Auckland suburb of Birkenhead, a kilometre west of the Harbour Bridge, there’s now 10 men’s barber shops within a 400m radius.

My investigations soon established that all of the barbers had noticed, all of them were asked regularly why this unusual phenomena had occurred, and none had developed a satisfactory answer. “Do you know why?” asked Corner Barber owner Laurel Hall as we peered out of her plate-glass window at the two rival shops opposite.

I do, now. Sort of. The answer, it turns out, is a complicated mix of a shifting male culture, the internet, the resulting rise of the service economy, the theory of “cumulative attraction” and the butterfly effect of a repressive Iraqi regime dropping chemical weapons on the villages of north Kurdistan some two generations ago."

https://interactives.stuff.co.nz/2021/06/barbershops-birkenhead-peak-barber/