Blog

Last fall, I posted a short piece about shoes, and how I was mor­ti­fied when I took an hon­est look at the con­di­tion of my shoes. I din’t men­tion that I also worked with a guy, Rod, who always had his shoe game together — nice shoes with a good pol­ish. Well, since that time, I have been slowly sift­ing through my shoe col­lec­tion. I now have a laun­dry bas­ket full of shoes I no longer like. From them, any unde­sir­able shoes that are not sig­nif­i­cantly worn will be donated to char­ity. The rest will be pitched. I fig­ured the only way to stop wear­ing busted shoes is to not own them. To that end, I used the occa­sion of ini­ti­at­ing Oper­a­tion Twenty12 as an oppor­tu­nity to pick up a new pair of shoes. They are pair of plain black Soho Oxford shoes by Robert Wayne. I spot­ted them at DSW about a month ago, but didn’t pur­chase them. Sub­se­quently, I haven’t been able to find the shoe at two dif­fer­ent DSW loca­tions. I rolled the dice yes­ter­day and went to the DSW at Wheaton Mall (Mary­land) and was dis­heart­ened to dis­cover the shoes were not dis­played. On a whim, I went to the clear­ance rack. (Well…that’s really not a whim, because I usu­ally start at the clear­ance rack at DSW (or any store for that mat­ter) and work my way back to the main area of the store.) Voila! There were my shoes. There were actu­ally two pairs of them. I debated whether I should just get both so that I could alter­nate and not wear one pair down. I decided not to get the sec­ond pair at the time, but I will likely go back today to pick them up. (Fin­gers crossed, hop­ing they’re still there.) It doesn’t hurt that the shoes are marked down from the DSW-discount price of $80 to $54. Both prices are well below the sug­gested retail of $119.

So, thus I make my start with the cloth­ing sec­tion of my project. It’s a baby step (pun intended), but it’s a step. Here are a few pic­tures of the shoes, jux­ta­posed with the shoes I was wear­ing yes­ter­day. Iron­i­cally, the shoes I had on yes­ter­day are the shoes that I ref­er­enced in my post in Octo­ber. Those old shoes are just sad. Busi­ness casual shouldn’t be an excuse for wear­ing busted gear.