In the past two weeks, I actually have spent nearly twenty greenbacks on shipping for footwear I not have.
This is, of course, due to the shoe conundrum that I first outlined over a year ago. The problem, in a nutshell, is that I can almost never find shoes in stores that fit both my odd-sized feet and my ecofrugal principles. I can try to keep my old ones going with Shoe Goo and new insoles, but sooner or later, they wear out beyond repair, and I spend weeks hunting all over for new ones. (Since I don't care in the least about fashion, I'd be perfectly happy to replace the old pair with an identical new pair from the same manufacturer—but invariably, whatever shoes I bought last are no longer available by the time I need to replace them.)
Now, nowadays, if I can not find out some thing in a store, the most apparent answer is commonly to look on the Internet. (If it exists anywhere inside the international, you can find it on line if you appearance difficult sufficient.) And certainly, there can be no scarcity in any respect of businesses promoting shoes online. Many of them, which incorporates Zappos and ShoeBuy.Com, even make it viable to search for shoes thru fabric, in addition to period and width?So I can quick narrow down the masses of available alternatives to the few that meet my pretty strict requirements. There's surely one snag: whilst you shop on-line, you cannot attempt things on earlier than you get them prepared. With garb, this can not be critical; as long as the internet site provides a length chart, you could usually get a quite right concept of which period will suit you. But with footwear, pairs which can be theoretically the equal length can feel completely special in your feet, and the only way to comprehend for effective is to put them on.
With the first pair of shoes I ordered, I thought I'd found a way around this problem; I had bought the same kind of shoes before from the same seller, so I thought it was safe to assume that another pair in the same size would still fit. Turns out, I only thought it was the same kind of shoes; they'd actually been redesigned, and part of the redesign apparently involved changing the fit so that it no longer worked with my feet. And while I'd paid nothing for the shipping from the seller, shipping them back to the seller ate up $6.50 of my refund.
Sadly, I don't have a similar excuse for ordering the other two pairs. I was just getting a little desperate at that point, because I can practically feel the sidewalk through last year's shoes, and I was ready to try anything that looked like it might meet my criteria. To give myself credit, I did at least try to find the shoes in a store; Brian and I drove all the way out to Iselin, about half an hour away, to the nearest shoe store we could find that carries Grasshoppers (a fairly popular brand with a lot of leather-free styles). I figured that even if they didn't have the style I wanted in stock, they should at least have something that I could try on and verify my size. Unfortunately, while they did indeed have several styles of Grasshoppers in stock, they didn't have anything in a 6 wide. So I just took a gamble and ordered it anyway—and it was too small. And the 6 1/2 wide was too big. Two more $6.50 return shipping fees down the drain, and still no shoes that fit.
At this point, I was getting sick of paying $6.50 a pop just for the privilege of trying on shoes that turned out not to fit. So I did what I probably should have done in the first place: I headed over to ShoeBuy.com, which offers free shipping in both directions. That eliminated the risk of being socked with return shipping cost if the shoes I liked didn't fit, but there was still the potential problem of lag time: having to wait for each pair to arrive before I could try it on, and then, if it didn't fit, having to order another pair and wait for that one. So this time I decided to order not one pair, but three pairs ofSkechers (which also has a large selection of vegan styles), each in a different size. That way, I figure, at least one of them is bound to fit, and I can return the ones that don't at no charge. Yes, it means spending $120 all at once, but I expect to get about two-thirds of it back, and anyway, there are some women who think nothing of dropping that much on just one pair of shoes.
Of route, there's one capacity worry here: the 3 pairs of Skechers I ordered are all wonderful styles, so there may be a much flung possibility that each one three of them will in shape and I won't be able to decide which ones to preserve and which to move lower back. But frankly, if that occurs, I suppose I may just be higher off maintaining all three?For the reason that with greater pairs stashed away, I won't must fear about this entire Cinderella business again for any other three years.
