7XMOM: Point Me To The $14.99 Tennis Shoe Rack | Lifestyles

If I wasn’t such a stingy, I would have given up when my eyes started to glaze over as the salesman explained to me. But throw a sales challenge in front of me, and I’m a dog with a favorite bone.

I was determined to find the right size, type and color to match with the right brand and label color to get my 50% off. I also emailed David with specific instructions, as he is not a browse and compare type buyer, but a see and type type buyer.

I started looking for shoes, but soon realized that most of them could only be full price shoes. I thought David’s would be the most expensive, so I went to help him decide before choosing.

The last time he bought tennis shoes, we were in Arkansas at a large outdoor store, and he had picked out some shoes, tried them on, and decided to pick up a pair before I quit browse the cast iron frying pans. .

This time he decided on, and I approved of, a pair that looked exactly like the last three pairs of tennis shoes he had purchased. When you have a good thing, why change?

Once I found out what its price was, I was able to find the appropriate label and get mine for half price.

Now let’s go to my 90 year old mother’s living room a few days later when she noticed I was wearing new shoes. (I know it’s a spoiler that I found a pair of shoes.)

“How much do you think it costs?” I asked him, who grew up during the Depression.

“No,” I replied. “I cut them in half, but they were originally $70.”

“What’s $70 worth in these shoes?” ” she asked.

“I know,” I say. “Shoe prices are exorbitant.”

Now you know I paid half $70 for my shoes. I like them, but there must be about $4 worth of stuff in them, and I can’t imagine whoever glued them is making that much per hour.

So why are tennis shoes so expensive? One of my sons just paid more for a pair of running shoes for his daughter than my rent for my first apartment.

Like so many things in life, I have no answers, just lots of questions.

I think I’m actually emotionally damaged by the whole shoe situation from the years I spent buying shoes for seven kids. School shoe shopping was one of the worst times of the year, and shoes probably cost less than $30 a pair at the time.

I still remember my only son – the one who just paid an arm and a leg for running shoes – sadly told me on a school shoe-buying expedition that he just wanted a so that he could have shoes that were this year’s style and not last year’s.

It broke my heart. I told him he could choose any pair of shoes he wanted, that I would pay half and he could pay half. I don’t remember how he ended up making money. He sold candy on the bus a year before he was arrested. Or maybe I paid him to do something.

Anyway, now he can afford all the shoes he wants, and I’m still a cheapskate.

For now I’m going to enjoy my shoes, and David replaced his everyday shoes with his new shoes and moved his everyday shoes to be the outdoor work shoes and threw away the old work shoes exterior. It’s a whole.

I still don’t know why tennis shoes are so expensive, other than the shoe manufacturers know we have to have them.