Whoa! Frugal Scholar left a lead in a comment on yesterday’s shoe-buying adventure to the effect that you can buy Sanitas seconds (and seconds for many other prominent brands) at a site called Footprints.com.
Well. Naturally I had to shoof that one out immediately.
This Footprints.com outfit IS kewl!!!! If you go to the “SALE!” page you can search by brand AND by size, so you can see whether they have anything that will fit you. Annndddd…what do we find here but the very $110 Sanitas the Shoe Mill was peddling for $120, marked down to $70. And OMG, some of them are actually in cute styles, rather than nurse’s clogs.
Drat!!! No Pikolinos, though. That’s the brand of the hand-made Spanish gems. Presumably if you’re making everything by hand, you don’t have seconds, eh?
Hm. No Naots or Mephistos, either.
But at least a zillion Birkies. If Dansko still fits your foot in its new incarnation, the site shows a bunch of those, too, including some attractive pump-like styles with soles that look sturdy enough to cushion your feet against the pavement. There are a lot of other brands, some of them Birkenoid or Danskoid, some of them of their own kind. They have men’s shoes, too.
And get this: You have as long as two months to try the things out!
{cackle!} I am going straight back to Shoe Mill to find out the brand name of that pair of heels I coveted. If these folks are carrying it, I’m gunna order it from them, straightaway. I may return the Sanitas and replace them with a pair from Footprints.com, too.
Women’s shoes that do not hurt and do not look like orthopedic appliances for nurses are incredibly expensive.
Hevvin help me, this afternoon I dropped $450 on three pairs of pain-frees. Amazingly fine pain-frees…but my god.
The attempt, undertaken almost a year ago, to buy pain-frees at bargain prices by raiding the Clark’s outlet failed miserably. I did buy several cute pairs of Indigos that seemed comfortable enough in the store. Yup. They were just great, as long as I didn’t try to walk in them. As soon as I tried to walk any distance further than across the store to the mirror, they wanted to fall off my feet, exactly as one would expect backless clogs to do, being nothing other than slides on platforms. I had to struggle to keep them on, and that was very uncomfortable, indeed. Eventually I figured out that they would sort of stay on if I adopted a mincing gait, taking teeny little steps that didn’t require me to lift my feet off the ground for more than a fraction of a second.
Picture, then, mincing a third of a mile across a university campus in shoes that wanted nothing more than to fall off or, preferably, to twist their wearer’s ankle. That’s about how far I have to walk from my car to my office.
Well, hell. I knew better than to buy bargain shoes at an outlet. The immediate cause of the neuromas that have damn near crippled me for the past 20 years was a pair of sweet little heels I bought at a shoe outlet. They seemed comfortable enough—when you’re young, beauty knows no pain. After I’d worn them for a few months (all the time, even walking the dog…which occasionally entailed running), my feet hurt so much I couldn’t walk in anything. I couldn’t walk barefooted, for crying out loud! Not until I tried on a pair of Birkenstocks (ohhh lovely! perfect for officewear) was I able to walk around an amusement park on vacation with my husband and child. It took over 15 years for my feet to get to the point where I could wear anything other than Birkenstocks or Mephistos without excruciating pain. Heels have been out of the question for decades.
So. I should’ve known that shoes that cost something under $40 were going to mess up my feet.
Old, tired, not cute
I dispensed with the Clark’s Indigo slides in the late great decluttering adventure, tossing them in on top of the mountain of clothes that went to St. Vincent de Paul. Absent the shoes that I couldn’t wear to walk in, I still needed a pair of unclunky brown shoes and a pair of brown Danskos (having worn my beloved old brown pair until they fell apart). So this afternoon, with $2,500 in the much-refreshed savings account, it was off to my favorite purveyor of pain-frees.
There I found that the original Dansko shoe (which died when Dansko was sold and the new owners started having the style manufactured, with evil results, in China) is still produced by an outfit called Sanita. Lo! A pair of Danskos that actually fits like the REAL Danskos used to fit.
Buy: $120.
Then, these hand-made Spanish shoes of amazing cut-out leather, almost lace-like, utterly free of pain, the effect incandescent with élan.
Buy x 2: $320.
That would come to, yes, $440.
Plus 8.1% tax. Don’t ask.
But I was personful: I put back the INCREDIBLY cute pair of heels that hurt only one toe and would have looked so unbelievably awesome with the pin-striped pants purchased in the late great recluttering coup. And I also put back the STAGGERINGLY cute moccasin-like flats hand-made by the same Spanish shoemaker. So, you see…after all, I did not spend $600 on shoes today. What a triumph.
As a practical matter, shoes purchased at this particular emporium last for many, many years. The pair I had on when I walked in the door are about six or eight years old and still fully serviceable. When I went into the closet this afternoon to throw out three pairs of shoes to make way for the three new pair, I really could find only one pair decrepit enough to justify tossing, and I haven’t bought good shoes in more than two years. Guess I’ll have to count the three pair of Clark’s clogs I tossed as the “one out for every one in.”
I think that, especially where shoes are concerned, it’s better to spend more on good products less often than less on shoddy products more often. I dunno about you, but when my feet hurt, I’m miserable. And most shoes hurt my feet. Women’s shoes are designed to hurt your feet: a good 95 percent of them are bone-crushers. When you find well-made shoes that don’t hurt and aren’t hideous, you should buy them, cost be damned. When I pay $120 for pair of Danskos Sanitas that last upwards of six years, their actual cost to me is about $20 a year.
So. In 2009 I’ll pay $75 for the use of three pairs of not-hideous, fully pain-free shoes.
Not a bad buy, eh?
LOL! The pair on the left is not really peacock-colored. They’re black and a subdued green, with gold thread decoration.
So after our Copyeditor’s Desk client tried to faze an indemnity clause past us in our 2009 contract, I politely demurred. We couldn’t, said I, sign a contract in which we promised to pay their lawyer’s fees for any action they should take against us, regardless of whether we were in the wrong or the right. In Arizona, I observed, courts generally award lawyer’s and court fees to the complainant if the suit is found to have substance. And, I added, the proposed arrangement was not fair to us.
It worked. The client allowed as how this paragraph was a piece of boilerplate she’d lifted off the Web and thanked us for pointing out its unfairness. She asked that we simply cross out and initial the offending passage and said the company would accept the revised agreement.
What a relief! Naturally, I wasn’t happy about causing a stink over a contract with our bread-and-butter client. On the other hand, there’s no way we could have agreed to any such arrangement. Better to go hungry now than to be pauperized later by circumstances over which you have no control.
The new laundry detergents may be ecofriendly but they’re none too housekeeper-friendly. Though they wash the stale B.O. out, they scarcely touch grease stains. If you use table linens and ecofriendly cloth napkins—or occasionally spill a little food on your clothes or get grease-splatters on you while you’re cooking—you’ll find that Costco’s Kirkland liquid detergent doesn’t get the spots out, even if you soak the spot in undiluted detergent. Nor does the new version of Spray-‘n’-Wash.
After the Christmas feast, my tablecloth came out of the laundry with a big grease spot. Three washings did nothing to remove the stain. As I was about to resign myself to either buying a new tablecloth or just getting used to the spot, I recalled the folk household hint that used to say Windex would work to remove spots from carpets and furniture.
Hmm. In the course of cooking up our own glass cleaner, we discovered that the main ingredients of Windex are varieties of alcohol, a solvent. I still had half a bottle of isopropyl alcohol purchased to make the DIY window and tile cleaner, so…..
I tested it first on a similarly stained napkin. Pouring straight rubbing alcohol on the stain and popping the napkin into the wash took out the grease and did not seem to remove the dye, as straight Kirkland’s laundry detergent has been known to do. So, yesterday evening I slopped some more of the alcohol on the tablecloth’s stain, let it sit for 15 or 20 minutes, and then ran it through the washer.
Hallelujah! The stain is GONE!
Score one for the frugalist: rubbing alcohol works to remove grease stains from fabric.
Remember that the stuff is flammable—don’t wave a cigarette around while you’re using it, and if your washer is right next to a gas water heater (as mine is), you might want to take the item somewhere else for the stand-and-soak step. I don’t think I’d use it on washable silk without first trying it on an old piece that I was about to throw out anyway. But it works fine on cotton.
Over at The Simple Dollar, Trent is kicking himself for what he calls“Seven Huge Financial Mistakes” he made while he was in college. Most of these, such as “Going into College without a Clue,” “Not Taking My Classes with Enough Seriousness,” and “Signing Up for a Credit Card—Then Using It with Reckless Abandon,” are functions of youth. No one should be surprised when a young person does exactly these things and all the other alleged missteps Trent describes.
Youth, after all, is wasted on the young.
As a veteran of 15 years of university teaching, I’d like to trot out a radical idea that has silently lurked inside my mind for a long time:
Students should not be allowed to go directly from their senior year in high school to their freshman year in college without passing “Go.” Given the staggering cost of a college or university education, its importance to a young person’s future, and the number of financial predators waiting to prey on the kids the instant they’re set loose with no real responsibilities and no parents to watch over them, America should make it an expectation that everyone will work or do paid community service for two years before enrolling in any form of higher education.
We should set up a national service program for young people, one that could send high school graduates anywhere in the U.S. and to parts of the world that are relatively safe for Americans to live and work. This program should provide jobs that pay more than minimum wage (possibly through a matching tuition savings plan) and build real-world, salable skills.
Then we should give high-school graduates three options:
a. join the military; b. sign up for a national service program; or c. get a job in the real world.
In addition to paying young people a salary, the national service program could provide something like a 401(k) for prospective college students, into which pre-tax dollars could be contributed—and employers would match this—to build a fund to help pay college tuition. Actually, for people under, say, 26 years of age, all private, municipal, and state employers could offer a 401(k)-style college tuition fund, with matching contributions. Since soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen risk their lives in the service of their country, the military should provide a benefit like the GI Bill with more generous provisions than the proposed tuition fund. The latter would apply only to the national service program and to real-world employment.
This scheme would have a number of advantages.
First, it would expose kids to a period of responsibility at a time when they need to build maturity…and at a time when, as Trent’s post so accurately reveals, many young people are simply not ready for college.
Second, it would allow the students themselves to earn a portion of their college tuition, even it it’s only a small portion. This would help them to appreciate what is entailed in earning the amount a university education costsbefore they rack up a lifetime of student debt, take some of the burden off parents’ shoulders, and give students time to learn responsible financial habits.
Third, it would get kids out of an environment where they can easily be exploited by credit-card mongers and others who make a business of ripping off college students. By the time the young people return to campus life, they will be two years older, more mature, and smarter. The difference between a 19-year-old and a 21-year-old is significant, particularly if that 21-year-old has been earning a living for a while.
Is a national service program socialism?
Yup. So are public universities and community colleges. So is federal support of research at private universities such as Harvard and Princeton. So are city roads, state routes, and interstate highways.
We work together to make life better.
It should be so. There’s nothing wrong with creating a program to employ young people productively and give them time to grow up before completing the final part of their education, when it ultimately will repay us all with a better-educated, wiser, and smarter workforce.
Hey, check this out: Mrs. Micah offers a lead to her friend Adam’s site, Your Money Relationship, whose proprietor is hustling up some readers and some publicity by offering chances at a free $50 gift Amazon.com certificate in exchange for a wide variety of lagniappes you can do for him.
Besides committing a smart move here, Adam has an interesting site. A freshly minted master of financial planning, he should know what he’s talking about when it comes to money management.
