I sometimes wonder how come the shoe trade is still here. Our share of public spending has been declining year on year ever since I came into the business, to the extent that very soon we shall be paying the customers to take the shoes away.

And last week we seemed to have pretty well arrived at that point.  Someone I know boasted, yes boasted, that he had bought a pair of patent leather ballerinas for his granddaughter.  For £3.

He showed me the shoes which were properly made. They had been pulled over a last, had a fabric lining and a cemented outsole. The real deal.

I swiftly disabused him (he is by the way, a well-paid lawyer) about the leather bit. The day has thankfully not yet dawned when you can buy leather shoes for £3, and pointed out that what he had bought was rubbish and unlikely to last a month, but he replied that quality didn't matter because his granddaughter would most likely tire of her present before then.

So not really do we have ridiculously cheap shoes, but disposable shoes. The goods we deal in are rapidly descending to the status of a supermarket bag.  Any moment now someone will say "landfill".

I gave him a lecture on the economics of his purchase. To sell a pair of shoes, even children's, at £3, with profits for the manufacturer, retailer and the importer, to say nothing of various agents along the way, shipping costs and possibly customs duty taken out of the retail price meant they must have been produced in some God-forsaken sweatshop by people whose employment conditions were not short of slavery.

I forbore from comparing the monthly wages of those workers with the hourly figure he charges (plus expenses). His conscience is his own affair, and indeed, he could, and most likely would, argue that if he did not buy those shoes someone else would.

I also didn't mention that being entirely synthetic they had warmed the planet to the extent of removing 10cc of ice from the polar icecap.

To be fair the chain he bought them from has the reputation of being cheaper than cheap, and the price was on large red stickers in each shoe so they may have been in the sale, but even so it has come to a pretty pass when you can buy a pair of shoes for less than a copy of the Economist.

About a year ago I mentioned a magazine that was giving away shoes with every copy, flip-flops admittedly, but ridiculously cheap shoes seems to be a coming thing. Shoes, which used to be highly valued items, to be polished, treasured and even loved, have become disposables, to be bought without thinking and thrown away with as little consideration as orange peel.

Now it is all very well saying that these two examples are special cases, but every step taken in those shoes is a step not taken in a real pair of shoes.  They are serious competition.

Thank goodness there are is still a demand for decent shoes sold at a proper price, and it could be argued that people like Manolo Blahniks, Jimmy Choos  balance out the give-away merchants, but I do wonder.

Quite apart from any moral considerations, the old maxim that 50% of nothing is half of nothing obtains.  You have to sell an awful lot of £3 shoes to pay the rent, staff, etc. etc. So who is getting anything out of this deal? Not the store that sold them, not the people who made them, not really the man who bought them, when his granddaughter tells him they don't fit and she wanted heels, nor the granddaughter herself, for if she is really going to wear them for only a week she can hardly be said to have had a pleasurable present. The whole deal looks very much a lose-lose one to me.

I suppose it could be argued that the sweatshop workers are marginally better of than they would have been living off the land, hoping the harvest would give them enough to eat. From their perspective they have got their feet on the first rung of the labour market and they can now hope to have regular meals, electric light in their shacks, and who knows, one day, be able to buy a bicycle.

We live in a world that is getting smaller by the day. What happens in the backstreets of Bangladesh or Shangdong is no longer something we can sweep under the carpet and ignore.

In case you have not noticed it the cost of living is going up. Basics like food and fuel, are much dearer than they were last year, and our councils tell us with a satisfied grin on their faces that business rates have only gone up a bit more than inflation, which is true, up to a point. When they talk of inflation they mean the government's figures issued every month, which are slewed by cheap goods (see above) bought in from developing countries. One of the reasons the price of food is going up is because the people who make those cheap goods are beginning to better themselves. The man who thought he was lucky to have a bicycle now expects a moped. His bowl of rice now has meat in it and he dreams of being able to afford one of those cheap cars that Tata are going to make. There is a direct connection between those cheap ballerinas and the price of your loaf of bread.

So don't expect throwaway shoes to go on for ever, or even much longer. But something tells me that whatever happens clothing and footwear will be down there at the bottom of the league tables.

Printer friendly version

Email this article to a friend