PROPOSITION

[telophase]

Shoe stores should have treadmills where you can walk for a while at different paces to see how your feet and the shoes are going to interact.

Comments

[lady_ganesh]

My daughter just runs across the store floor, but that's the advantage of being eight.

[rydra_wong]

In my pre-caffeinated state, I read this as "Stories should have treadmills where you can walk for a while at different paces to see how your feet and the story are going to interact." I think it could work well for really long novels ...

Some climbing shoe shops will have a board with a few holds on it that you can step up on, for this reason (technical climbing shoes are not designed for walking in).

[ginny_t]

This is an excellent idea!

[chomiji]

THIS!

(Seriously. So many pairs of shoes that turned out to be icky under real-life conditions ... .)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Yup. On Tuesday I took my latest two pairs to the shoe repair place nearby* for the toe boxes to be stretched, as they both felt perfectly fine for the first while after I bought them, then promptly turned into foot-rubbing shoes of DOOM.


* I have a shoe repair place nearby! A proper one, with portly men in long aprons, extremely shabby shelves, and three shoes on display in the window, all out of fashion and covered in dust!

[kintail.livejournal.com]

Wow, that IS a proper shoe repair place! I used to live near one, but haven't found one again since I moved.

And I agree with your proposition.

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

More than just treadmills. Also different surfaces, like cement, cobblestone, simulated grass. And an area large enough you can run and spin. Tennis sneakers are supposed to have some fancy tech for stability and I'd really like to check that out.

[blissfish.livejournal.com]

I know. I love that running stores have treadmills for trying out shoes - maybe more stores will catch on.

[janni.livejournal.com]

Our local running shoe store has this. Had me run barefoot on it to decide what sort of shoes would best work with my feet.

The outdoors store instead has a sample rocky slope for climbing.

[tygerr.livejournal.com]

You seem to be operating under the misapprehension that shoe stores exist to meet their customers' footwear needs and make them happy thereby.

Shoe stores exist to separate you from your money. The most efficient way to do this is to sell you cheap cr*p at inflated prices. And it's hard to do that if the consumer is informed ahead of time regarding the quality/cr*ppiness of any given pair of shoes. It might even cause a customer to shop somewhere else with a better price/quality point.

So a treadmill would increase costs while reducing sales, and likely also would steer sales to less-profitable shoes. And they can't be having THAT.