I HATE shoe-shopping.
Shoe-shopping is my personal form of hell. Shoe Hell.
You may be familiar with the several types of shops in Shoe Hell:
1. Cheap shoe shops (Too affordable; can't admit to having shopped there due to their definite use of sweat-shop labour. No shop assistants to bother you).
2. Normal shoe shops (affordable, and just enough ambiguity around manufacturing conditions to feel okay about shopping there. Shop assistants all over you like a rash).
3. Fancy shoe shops (completely unaffordable, and shop assistants that only like you if you're a fancy person).
In most social settings, you make friends by being really nice and smiling a lot.
But in a fancy shoe shop, the rules change. Being really nice is a sign that you're not cool enough to be in their shop.
In a fancy shoe shop, you have to act like you are so unexcited by the prospect of buying a new pair of shoes, that they would be lucky to even have one of your toes touch one of their shoes for the briefest of moments.
And people who work in fancy shoe-shops are like drug dogs. They can sniff out a non-fancy person in a flash. Usually by the state of your current shoes.
They think I don't see their disapproving darting glances at my shoes, but I do.
I always do.
Shoe-shopping is my personal form of hell. Shoe Hell.
You may be familiar with the several types of shops in Shoe Hell:
1. Cheap shoe shops (Too affordable; can't admit to having shopped there due to their definite use of sweat-shop labour. No shop assistants to bother you).
2. Normal shoe shops (affordable, and just enough ambiguity around manufacturing conditions to feel okay about shopping there. Shop assistants all over you like a rash).
3. Fancy shoe shops (completely unaffordable, and shop assistants that only like you if you're a fancy person).
In most social settings, you make friends by being really nice and smiling a lot.
But in a fancy shoe shop, the rules change. Being really nice is a sign that you're not cool enough to be in their shop.
In a fancy shoe shop, you have to act like you are so unexcited by the prospect of buying a new pair of shoes, that they would be lucky to even have one of your toes touch one of their shoes for the briefest of moments.
And people who work in fancy shoe-shops are like drug dogs. They can sniff out a non-fancy person in a flash. Usually by the state of your current shoes.
They think I don't see their disapproving darting glances at my shoes, but I do.
I always do.
"I can tell from your shoes that you do not belong in this shop."
"Actually, I'd rather you didn't put your giant working-class feet in my fancy shoes."
"Disgraceful. Get out of my shop immediately, un-fancy girl."
"Price-dictated purchasing. How vulgar."
"Five hundred dollars more than you can afford, peasant girl."
"Five, four, three, two..."
"...One. Run along now."
The End. (There are no happy endings in Shoe Hell, sorry...)
5 comments:
Anna, i would love to go shoe shopping with you. I will chat up the shoe seller so you can try your shoes on in peace. And there will be two of us, which is a mob, which means we are a force and we out number them and they can't intimidate us!
Oh fancy shops! I went into one in Christchurch because I wanted some nice fair-trade, organic cotton jeans, and it was horrible. Admittedly I was wearing my old gardening clothes so I looked particularly bedraggled but all the same! Anyway, the earthquake got that shop...
Anna we have the same size feet. We could share shoes. Similar experience when going from Opononi where one lives in gumboots and sooty, bread dough stained clothes, then dress up nice to go to posh Kerikeri to shop, only to find that one's scrubbing up does not even make one passable... except in the op shops.
ha ha. your drawings and social comments give me such simple joy!
have you looked into less socially acceptable forms of shopping. theft may work for you when fancy shoe shopping. fancy shop assistants probably cant run fast in their fancy shoes.(unless they are burkeinstocks or comfy moulded to youre foot ones)then youd best not attempt it.
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