Like most guys I’m not particularly keen on shopping. I’d much rather do it from the comfort of my home via the Internet rather than traipse round town centres and shopping centres. However there are some things you can’t really buy online and shoes are one of them, at least if you want them to fit properly.
When I go shoe shopping though I get very frustrated. Not because I don’t like trying shoes on, because I can’t find anything in my size. I’m only a size 12, which isn’t particularly big. I’m only 6’2”, which while tall isn’t exactly freakishly tall. There are many people taller than me in most rooms or shops, yet it seems that most shoe shops only carry a limited stock of size 12 shoes. Plus, the shoes they do have in a 12 are never the ones I want.
Why do shoe shops only cater for short, stunted guys? When I have to pick up a shoe I want and ask the poor girl at the till if she has it in a size 12 I feel slightly embarrassed. Why should I feel ashamed to have such gargantuan feet? I’m large; I can’t be the only one? There must be other guys out there who require size 12 shoes, yet the best designs are made just for midgets and inadequate guys who wear size 8.
As a nation we’re getting taller year on year, but no one seems to be adapting to that when it comes to making shoes. I don’t want to feel like a freak for asking for a 12 in a shoe shop, yet because I’m bigger than most men it seems to happen that way.
Anyway, I did manage to buy two pairs of sized 12 shoes in Chester yesterday. One was in Jones’ the Bootmakers and one was in Debenhams. They were OK, the pair of Kickers from Debenhams were quite good, but I saw better shoes elsewhere that only come in midget sizes. Next had a cool pair that seemed to only go up to an 8, and they couldn’t even order a 12 because they don’t carry them. There was a great pair of Adidas in another shop that seemed to peak at a 10.
Life is tough when you’re not a stunted midget.
Darren Jamieson, aka MrDaz, is the Technical Director and co-founder of Engage Web and has been working online in a career spanning two decades. His first website was built in 1998 and is still live today.
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