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SHOE DO YOU LOVE?

I would like to take this moment to apologize to my wife. And while you may think you know why, you would be wrong. OK, you would probably be right, but just not right for the sake of this column. (Technically correct but wrong for this column answers include (a) packing nothing but donuts for the kids’ lunches (b) teaching our daughter the joy of headbutting and (c) the time my wife fell asleep in the car while we were on a trip and I proceeded to stack everything I could reach on her. (Note to bored drivers who think that may be a fun idea: The fun ended as soon as she woke up.)

So my apology for today goes out to my wife for my repeated nagging I give her for her shoe collection. I say collection, because a collection is rarely used, and just kinda sits there. You see, my wife has approximately 4 million pairs of shoes. Roughly half of those are black shoes that, to me, look identical. I have routinely chided my wife about the shoes. She tells me that she needs every pair.

I disagree with that. For one thing, she wears two or three pairs on a regular basis, which is what most people do. I, for one, have three pairs of shoes I wear. And they are fine. They fill the void. Regardless of the event, I have my shoe concerns taken care of. But my wife insists she needs these extra shoes. I suppose they are backup shoes.

So this is how we exist. My wife buys shoes and piles them in the closet, hanging out with all of the other shoes that never get worn. I used to get annoyed about it. And then I read a newspaper article about shoes. This article was about the price of shoes, in particular the high-end fashion models. And in said article, I learned that there are people out there who will pay more than $1,000 for a pair of ugly sandals.

Apparently, if you attach the name “Manolo Blahnik” to your shoes, you can charge more than most people pay for their first car. If you feel like slumming you can put the name “Jimmy Choo” on them and charge an amount roughly comparably to an apartment’s rent. And one thing I can say for certain: Ugly is expensive, because these shoes have some of the most off-putting fashions attached to them. I guess you can spend this much money so that you can say, “Yes, they are ugly, but they cost more than a new television!” Fortunately, my wife does not have expensive shoe taste. She is a functional person first and foremost, and she would no sooner spend $1,000 on a pair of shoes than she would eat a live cat. My wife, apparently, just loves a good bargain.

If you were to add up every single one of her shoe purchases, it would come nowhere near the $650 for a single pair of Jimmy Choo sandals that, to me, look like someone took a gold bedroom slipper and affixed costume jewelry to it.

In the article, the author quizzed a group of men and women about the price of the shoes. For the $1,190 pair, the average price guessed by men was $49. The average price by women was $133. The average guess for the $650 sandal was $95 for men and $94 for women. So what can we learn from this quick survey? I think it’s that you should leave the price tags on your sandals so that people can realize just how expensively fantastic your fashion taste is.

So my wife may have bunches of shoes, but at least they are reasonably priced shoes. My wife is very sensible, so I don’t foresee the shoe thing becoming an issue any time soon. I suppose if she has to horde shoes, I should thank my lucky stars that she does it on a tight budget. I am fairly certain my reaction to a Jimmy Choo addition to my house would not be pleasant. Of course, it wouldn’t be nearly as bad as if she bought the shoes and then took the price tag off.

Oh, yeah, and I’m sorry.