No Substitute

This past weekend I took our daughter over to a nearby shoe store that I’m not going to identify (or provide a link to) because they’re annoying me and I’ll probably end up calling them something actionable before the end of this post, but you’ve probably seen this chain or something quite like them before. Basically, it’s a single huge room the size of an aircraft hangar with long aisles of shoes piled up, surrounded by banners, signs and other promotional artifacts that extol the high quality and low prices of these products to the high heavens. There are “Clearance” racks on the back wall (which contain the products that the store no longer has enough of to make up a complete pile) and four cash registers at the front, and that’s about it. The company calls it a “shoe warehouse” and apart from having carpet and zombie-like sales associates instead of concrete floors and forklifts it’s not a bad description. You might expect that this would be an easy place to find a good quality pair of dress shoes at a decent price. If so, you’re either an idiot or else you have feet in one of the three or four most common sizes…

Walking up and down the aisles (any of which are long enough to land a small plane on), I was struck almost at once by the lack of size choices available. Specifically, there was nothing available below a 9 or above an 11 in most of the products offered for sale. Granted that these are the most common men’s shoe sizes, and that these constitute something on the order of 70% of all products for sale, that still makes it impossible for a significant number of people (in the greater Lansing area, 30% of all male customers would mean something like 45,000 to 50,000 people) whom you’re just blowing off. Telling, in fact, to go away and not give you any of their money. When the first style of shoe I wanted to buy turned out to have nothing in my size, I went to the next decent style, and the next and the next, without any success. Disheartened by this, I went to find a sales zombie and ask if they had any additional stock anywhere…

At this point, the shoe warehouse had already broken the First Law of Business by not taking my money, but now they went the extra mile and broke the Second Law as well. The salesperson I found told me that they don’t have any back stock; what they have is what you see out on the floor. However, they do have a special online service you can sign up for which has a much wider range of sizes, and will sell them to you electronically and send them to you free of shipping charges! All you have to do is fill out their paperwork and agree to receive an almost unlimited amount of SPAM emails in order to have the privilege of spending money on shoes you can’t try on and will have the devil’s own time trying to return! Was that something I might be interested in? I think the sales zombie almost cracked an expression when I said, flatly, “no,” but it was hard to be sure…

I could point out, of course, that if I wanted to do my shopping online there are already several websites that specialize just on virtual shoe sales, not to mention sites like Amazon that carry all manner of foot ware, and none of which require extensive (and invasive) sign-up procedures. But the fact is, I don’t buy shoes online, simply because there is a fair amount of variability in shoe sizes depending on the manufacturer and style selected. There are some shoes where I’m a 12 1/5, and others where I need a 14 just to have a chance of getting my feet into them, and there’s no way to tell which is which in a virtual shoe store. There’s also a little matter of needing to wear them the following day, not some time in a week or two when the shipping department and the freight carrier get around to sending them to me. Until such time as you can virtual try on a pair of shoes and reliably get them delivered the next day, there’s really no substitute for an old-school shoe store – and the shoe warehouse people should probably put more effort into their original business model…