There are more rewarding parts of parenting and there are less rewarding parts of parenting, but I would have to say one of the least rewarding parts of parenting is the part where you have to take the kids to buy shoes. And you have to do this every time. You can’t just do it once v’zehu.
The store is always crowded. Everyone buys shoes either at the beginning of the school year or before yom tov, so this month is pretty busy. And unlike with an adult shoe store, you’re not allowed to just help yourself to a pair of shoes. Even though you’re paying for it. That’s illegal. You have to wait for a salesperson. And the store, in order to ease the flow of traffic in this busy shoe season, has hired one salesperson. Who, for the sake of efficiency, is also the person who rings you up.
You have to get the guy. My wife is a big believer in the guy. I walk into the store and say to my kid, “What are you wearing now? Let’s start one size up from that and see what happens.” And my wife walks over to me and says, “Did you get a guy?”
The shoe industry has us convinced—right or wrong, I don’t know—that every child’s shoe has to be professionally vetted by someone with a degree in foot science. They don’t just hire a random person and say, “This is how you use the foot-measuring thingy.”
So you have to wait. Where I don’t know. There are never enough seats, and there are people everywhere, trying to pass the time by helping themselves. Because while you’re waiting, there’s nothing to look at, there’s nothing to browse. It’s just more shoes. They can’t at least put out magazines or something? You can’t even see most of the shoes. Most of the store’s merchandise is in closed boxes that no one can see unless they open all of them one at a time, and leave the contents everywhere, which they do.
I know that when I’m at home and more than 2 people leave their shoes in the living room, I can’t handle it. If I worked in a shoe store, I would completely lose my cool five minutes in.
“Who keeps leaving shoes everywhere?! That’s it; I’m throwing them outside!”
It’s not like he’s such a major professional. He knows how to rewrap the shoes properly, so that’s something, and he knows which heel to put on which side of the measuring device without trying each foot three times like he’s plugging in a USB. And he knows what the device is called. You would just say, “Where’s the thingy? I can never find the thingy!”
I’m telling you; five minutes.
But most importantly, he has access to the back. That way, you can ask him to go to the back to check if they have anything else that is similar to what you’re currently looking at. Because that’s where they keep most of their stuff, probably—in the back. That’s the most efficient way to run a store. Not in all these closed boxes in the room itself.
So he has to walk out of the room five times for every customer, climbing over shoes and shoe boxes and parents… Have you been to the back? That door leads to an alley. There’s no back. You think there’s a whole second store back there? If you ask him to check for things in the back, he walks out the back door, goes off to recuperate in his car, and comes back and says, “There’s nothing back there.” And he’s not lying. There is literally nothing back here. And you misunderstand him. You find another shoe you almost like and you ask to check the back again.
You also ask if he has anything in a leather upper, because you remember that your parents always asked that, and that’s your minhag. We like buying leather uppers so that, come Yom Kippur and Tishah B’Av, we have to figure out why we have no shoes in the house that don’t have leather. But leather breathes, you’ve heard, and your children’s feet smell, and you thought most people’s feet smell, but then how come everything is man-made uppers? Why is man making inferior materials to the things that already exist? They looked at nature and said, “You know, there’s no reason we can’t come up with something worse!” Why are they bothering? At best, you’ve seen a tag that says, “leather and man-made upper” but it never says what percentage of the upper is leather. You’re trusting that it’s mostly leather, but who says? It doesn’t list ingredients.
“Ask the professional. He’ll know.”
Yeah, he makes the shoes.
And then no matter what shoes the professional recommends and puts on your child, you determine whether the shoes actually fit by using the rule of thumb, which is that you mash your thumb into the top of the shoe, and if your kid goes, “Ouch!” you say, “Do you have anything bigger? His shoes need to fit his feet and my thumb.”
See, the problem with buying shoes is that you have no idea what’s going on inside the shoe. You don’t know where the toes are. It’s not like socks, where if the toe doesn’t reach the end of the sock, you see the toe part of the shoe flopping around like a tichel.
Because the thing is that nobody trusts shoe sizes. The guy measures it and says, “Your child is a size 2!” and then he puts a 2 on your child, and you should trust it! But no, you have to feel it with your thumb, like you’re buying a cantaloupe. And if your child says, “Ow!” you know you hit a toe. But you still have to ask: “Did I nick the end of your toe, or did I get it full on?” This is a real warm parent-child bonding experience.
But the size thing makes no sense in the first place, because what’s with the half sizes? Are we measuring actual units of something? Because for a while, I thought maybe it was inches, like size 10 ½ was 10 ½ inches, and 12 inches was a foot (they’re all a foot), but that doesn’t explain size 1. Is someone’s foot one inch? And why it’s bigger than a children’s 13? Why are the numbers starting over? Is there a shortage of numbers?
Why test it, right? If it’s a size 2, it’s a 2, no?
No. It’s like a Cinderella thing, where there’s one pair of shoes in the entire store that will properly fit your child, and no one else in the world fits into it, but the shoe company that has never personally met your child somehow randomly made one that somehow fits only his foot. They’re just blindly slapping the shoes together and hoping that some kid out there walks into the correct store.
Or maybe it’s the salesperson we don’t trust. This guy that we had to wait for to get his professional opinion, and suddenly we’re like, “He’s just trying to make a buck, unloading the unpopular sizes.” The salesman says, “This is the size that fits him,” and you say, “Can we get him something bigger that he can grow into, so we don’t have to come in again before Rosh Hashanah?” And the salesman says, “No.”
The salesman does not care that there’s no room in the toe for your child to grow into. That doesn’t bother him. And to be honest, there is not a single shoe that your child stopped wearing because his toes burst through the front. The shoes are designed to wear out long before that happens.
The thumb-jamming can’t be good for that either.
Yet you mash your thumb into your child’s shoe to have some idea of where his toes are, like maybe he put them on backwards, and then you tell him to walk to the end of the aisle.
And suddenly your child is like, “Walk? What do you mean? What is walk?” The whole time that you’re waiting for the salesperson, your kid is running around the store, up and down the aisles, no matter how many times you tell him to come watch you relace a pair of shoes. Finally, you say, “Run around in these shoes and see how you feel,” and he says, “I don’t know how to run. I’m tired. Drag me up the aisles.” Like at the supermarket. His feet stopped working.
And then, based on how the kid walked, you have to decide whether to say, “Let’s try a different pair! You’re walking funny!” or “Eh, it’ll mold to your feet.” Which one you say is highly dependent on how long you’ve been in the store so far.
And then after this whole process, you have to do it again the next year! Sometimes sooner, if you decided to save money.
What else do we buy our kids that we have to get fitted like this?
Glasses! Glasses are a big deal too, but with glasses you can make an appointment and it’s quiet, and the guy says, “This is your prescription.” You don’t have to see how your kid walks around in that prescription, or send your kid to run down the hallway and see if he bumps into the wall.
“Do you have anything stronger for him to grow into?”
Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia and is the author of seven books, published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send questions, comments, or ideas to MSchmutter@gmail.com. Read more of Mordechai Schmutter’s articles at 5TJT.com.
