Feet Don't Fail Me Now
By Carrington Vanston // 2004 Aug 11
A lot of shoe shops have recently opened just down the street from where I live. What's unique about these shoe shops is that each one is run by a former web designer. Not surprisingly, most of these stores were mind bogglingly awkward--if not impossible--to shop in.
Coincidentally, I needed a new pair of shoes. I took a stroll down to Webshoe Lane to check out the stores.
I went into the first shop I saw, and a pleasant sales clerk came up to me and offered to place 3-D photos of their shoes into my animation scrapbook.
"I don't have an animation scrapbook."
The clerk just looked at my blankly. "But our catalog needs to go into your scrapbook. It's a great catalog. It's animated and in 3-D. It offers a better shopping experience than just shelves of shoes."
"Well, I don't have a scrapbook. Can't I just look around at the shoes you have available?"
"No. We don't bother putting any shoes on our shelves because we have such a great animated 3-D musical catalog. You'll like it. It has tiny versions of classic arcade games you can play."
"So I've come all the way down the road and right into your shop, and you have nothing to show me because you assumed I'd assist you with your animated 3-D musical arcade game playing catalog?"
"Um...it's a really great catalog."
I'm sure it was, but I walked on down the street to the next shoe shop anyway.
At least, I think it was a shoe shop. I didn't actually get to see inside the store. When I tried to enter the doorman sniffed me, mumbled to himself something about not recognizing my tailor, then roughly shoved me back outside.
I asked him why he wouldn't let me in.
"It's my job to arrange the store shelves to best meet your individual needs as a unique and important customer. With a single sniff of your clothing labels I can determine your needs and customize our store for you. Our shop owner has paid a lot of money to have many different store layouts available to suit his customers' individual preferences."
"Okay, so let me in."
"I don't recognize your tailor."
"So?"
"So I can't arrange the store to suit your needs."
"Let me in anyway. I don't care what the shelves look like. I'm not here to buy shelves, I'm here to buy shoes."
"But I don't recognize your tailor. I have a list of all the tailors our shop owner had heard about, and yours isn't on it."
"Maybe it's a new tailor. Maybe the list is incomplete. Why does it matter--just let me inside to buy shoes."
"I can't. It's my job to arrange the store shelves to best meet your individual needs as a unique and important customer. With a single sniff..."
I walked away.
The next shop I encountered had a small, neatly printed sign on the door:
Our price tags can only be seen with Opticadabra brand eyeglasses.
I was wearing a different brand of glasses, so I asked the proprietor what I should do. He advised me to go home and change into Opticadabra glasses.
When I stepped out of the cab, the shop exploded. Not into flames, but into advertisements for adult video stores.
"But I don't want to change glasses. Why not just make your price tags visible to anyone? If I can't see your prices with my own glasses, I'm not going home to change them--I'm going to another store to shop."
"But ours are particularly great looking price tags. Wait until you see them. Very, very nice. I'm afraid there's just no way I can show you our shoe prices unless you change into Opticadabra glasses."
I walked on, wondering how much Opticadabra was paying him to limit his customer base like that.
I had no better luck at the next shop I tried. It was quite a few blocks away, so I hailed a cab. I was looking for a store called "The Friendly Elf Shoe Cellar" but when I told the taxi driver to take me there he accidentally took me to "The Friendly Elf Shoe Seller" instead.
When I stepped out of the cab, the shop exploded. Not into flames, but into advertisements for adult video stores. Suddenly the air was thick with posters and flyers and buttons and badges and all manner of advertisements for porn shops.
It was a porñata.
As I was shoveling aside the ads, I spotted the shopkeeper high up a nearby ladder arranging another precarious pile of flyers to unleash on the next person to walk by.
"Why did you try to bury me in ads for adult video stores?"
"Have you got some kind of problem with naked people? This is a freedom of speech issue! I'm allowed to do this!"
"I don't have a problem with adult videos. I have a problem with you advertising your place as The Friendly Elf Shoe Seller when (a) you don't actually sell shoes, (b) you're obviously targeting people who meant to visit the The Friendly Elf Shoe Cellar, and (c) you don't even look to see whether someone is a child or a nun or something before you bury them in booby flyers."
"You are repressed! You are afraid of sex! FREEDOM OF SPEECH!"
"I'm not afraid of sex. At least, not usually. I guess it depends on who gets to hold the whip. But I'm an adult. What if I'd been my 8 year old nephew instead?"
"Freedom of speech! Besides," he said pointing to something on the ground, "I used that form there to ask if you were an adult."
"But you wrote it on the back of a postcard of a naked teenage girl."
"FREEDOM OF SPEECH!"
I tried to argue, but he started throwing pictures of penises at me. I walked on.
I crossed the street to visit a shop I'd heard good things about, but when I got there I couldn't see inside. The shop's doors and windows were completely blocked by a stack of televisions playing a generic cartoon that described the company's philosophy of shoemaking, the "emotional resonance" of its heel designs, and so forth.
The door wouldn't unlock until the end of the show, or until I bent down to the floor and found some tiny little button labeled "skip." I just rolled my eyes and walked on.
I came to another store. It seemed to have a nice selection of shoes but it was blaring music I didn't like. Worst of all, it was playing it through my own iPod's headphones. I was too annoyed to look at the shoe prices, so I walked on.
Next door was yet another shoe shop, the last on the street. Turning the doorknob was very difficult since it was too big for my hand. When I was finally inside, I tried to browse around but my feet kept slipping through holes in the floor, and I kept banging my head on low beams. Most of the shelves were empty (although the shopkeeper insisted he could see shoes on them), and the few shoes I could see had price tags so small it was as if they were written in Morse code.
The shopkeeper listened to me describe the problems I'd had shopping in his store, but he wasn't receptive to change. "That door handle works fine for me and I never bang my head on those beams. I wear these big thick glasses so I can read the price tags no problem, and the holes in the floor are a design choice. So you can't blame the shop. The fault is clearly your own."
"But I'm the customer. Shouldn't the store fit me?"
"How could I know what you'd want. It fits me, so obviously the problem is with you."
I solved the problem by walking away.
In fact, I just gave up and went home. Nobody needs shoes that badly. Besides, I had recorded a television documentary about how poor online sales at most sites can be blamed on people not trusting online credit card transactions even though they happily give out their credit card numbers over the phone all the time.
Yeah, I'm sure it's just a security issue. What else could it be?
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Carrington Vanston is a humorist and atheist. Or vice versa. He wrote and directed the long forthcoming feature film Duck Duck Goose. He has written two tiny plays which had two tiny productions: The Sound Of Two Hands Typing and Stark Raving Happy. He speaks three languages fluently, but two of them are English with a silly accent. The third is English with a slightly less silly accent. He can pronounce his full name backwards, he has a favorite mathematical equation, and he wants that $2 you owe him. Carrington should be stored in a cool, dry place, and may explode if heated.