Sneaker Man

Recently, Rachel and I went to Famous Footwear in Deptford to look at sneakers. My sneakers are starting to fall apart - literally. The soles of my shoes have holes in the bottom of each, and are beginning to collect rocks in them.
I’m extremely picky about my shoes. I’m a fan of basic shoes, no weird colors, designs, or ridiculous logos. We walked into the store and started to browse the shoe selection. We looked through the women’s section, and quickly browsed the men’s department as we headed for the clearance section. As soon as we get to the clearance section, Sneaker Man pops his chubby head from behind a rack of children’s shoes and asks “if we need any assistance?”

First, if I needed assistance then I would ask for it. I don’t need you sneaking out from behind a shoe wrack to ask if I “needed assistance.” It’s not like I need to ask for a shoe size, since this is Famous Footwear, a shoe store that has all of their sneakers in the store ready for customers to try on. I’m not going to seek you out to ask if you have this shoe in my size, when I could clearly look myself.

Second, why the hell are you hiding behind the shoe rack in the first place? I understand that your company probably has a policy to harass customers, but do you need to hide behind shoe racks and wait for unsuspecting customers to be startled by your presence? If that’s how you attempt to make a sale, I can only imagine what you do when you actually sell a pair of shoes. Dance in the parking lot naked?

God, I hope not.

I kindly tell him that I’m just browsing, and Rachel tells him that I’m a very picky about my shoes. By this point we are browsing the boys sneakers, since my feet are abnormally tiny for my height. Sneaker Man nods his head, and then “corrects” me by telling me that I’m in the “boy’s section.”

Really! I had no clue I was in the boy's section. I guess I must have missed all the clues that I was in the children’s section, such as the extremely tiny shoes or the sneakers with Spiderman on them! Did he really think I was lost or was he being that much of a dick since I didn’t want his help?

My reply - “I have abnormally small feet.”

What I would like to have said - “Really! Did you know that you were really fat?”

I started to walk away, when he asked me what size shoe I wear in boys. Was this man really still bugging me? At that very moment, I made the conscience decision that I wasn’t going to buy any shoes at Famous Footwear, since Sneaker Man wanted to continue to pester me. To make the experience even more amusing, when I told him that I was a 6 in boy’s sneakers, he tried to tell me that it was the equivalent of a 7 in women’s.

Does he even know anything about shoes? If you want to convert men's shoe sizes to women's, you simply add 2 sizes. So if I'm a 6 in men's (which is actually considered a boy's shoe size) I would be an 8 in women's.