Women’s Shoe Department: The True Final Frontier
Photo credit: kensolin.com
The holiday crush has finally ended, resolutions have already been made (and br0ken), and the last of the college football games is airing as I write this. What better time than now to reflect back on a particular shopping experience I had during the season and offer some friendly advice to my fellow mankind.
With all due respect to the late Gene Roddenberry, but Star Trek is not the ‘Final Frontier’ for man; a women’s shoe department is.
The Redhead’s birthday happened to fall on Thanksgiving this past year. She wanted shoes. Not just any kind of shoes either, but a particular kind of house shoe. As any good fashionista with a man in her life knows to do, she dropped hints. By hints I mean blatantly emailing links to the shoe…along with other “ideas” for the occasion.
Being the Texan that I am, I thought, “piece of of cake”. I mean I did have the freaking picture and store it came from right? God help me, but no. I was completely wrong. However, for the greater good of you out there who are reading this post and have “equipment” that rhymes with “Enos”, I can impart to you 5 things I learned. Here is hoping that it makes your first, and hopefully last, trip into a women’s shoe department survivable.
1. Have a few before you go–No, I’m not talking about a couple of cokes. I mean adult beverages. Trust me, the more, um, laid back you feel going in, the less the environment (think copious amounts of estrogen, throw in a heave dose of criticism, and sprinkle in a touch of fashionable gay–mainly from the male clerks) will bother you.
2. Make sure you have correct image information beforehand–Don’t even think about walking in a women’s shoe department empty-handed. Even with the correct information and an image, I still couldn’t figure it out. But if you walk in with nothing, you have no shot.
3. Under no circumstances do you try to find the things yourself–There is no rhyme or reason to the organization of the department; though I’m sure evey female reading this will vehemently argue this point, then spout a floor plan the way us guys spout out baseball statistics. Also, this is the only place on earth where you can look at three objects that appear exactly the same, only to be told that they are three completely DIFFERENT things. Men, this is why our women nine pair of black boots that we can’t distinguish between.
Just ask a clerk. This is why you need the information and preferably an image. Just hand it over to the clerk and grunt something like “Me need these footwears. Thank you”. However….
4. Don’t expect to be served in a timely fashion–Let me be ultra clear on this point. You are a MAN in a WOMEN’S shoe department full of WOMEN! You have a snowball’s chance in hell of being served in a timely fashion and that snowball just melted. You are not where the money is and every clerk in the joint can see that you are only there to buy one pair of shoes and then will run like the wind. You can’t be upsold for extra commission; therefore, you must wait at the gate to the doldrums of your new idea of hell in order to purchase an object for your wife/fiancee/girlfriend that you can only hope will impress her enough to yield your idea of heaven at a later date.
5. If all fails, grab gift card for that store, attach it to picture of shoes to show you attempted, then let her get them herself–Cheap out, I know. But it’s better than the alternative: getting the “wrong” pair of shoes and having to go back there to get the “correct” pair. This time however, your wife/fiancee/girlfriend will be coming with you.
That’s a whole different version of hell.
