The Great Shoe Purge of 2009

To be soon followed (hopefully) by the merciless razing of the spring wardrobe!

Anyway, for those of you who don't use Facebook or know me on there, I wanted to mention here that this past weekend I did a major purge of my shoes.

Here's the problem with me and shoes. Well, ok, with me and every frickin' thing:

Firstly, I. like. stuff. I can't help it; it's in my nature. Secondly, shoes are more complicated than one might think. In fact, let me explain what caused the Great Purge.

Back in 2000 (or possibly 1999 URK) I bought a pair of heeled, loafer-ish shoes to wear with pants. They were black patent leather and had just the right heel height and heel thickness that I like. They looked nice and fit great. As you may well imagine, wearing these shoes over the course of 9 years or so caused them to wear the hell out. This wear and tear actually started to show in, say, 2003. So sometime in 2003 or 2004 I decided that I needed to buy a replacement for these shoes. I bought something. Meh. Not ideal. A few months go by and I bought another pair of shoes. These are worse than the other replacement pair. A year goes by, and I bought another pair.... You can see the trend here? So what ends up happening, in many cases, is that I end up with 4 pairs of shoes, when really it should be one. AND I never actually got rid of that FIRST pair. I'd say that over the last 15 years or so, one out of every 10 pairs of shoes I have ever bought have been ones that I love to wear and are my "go to" shoes for specific occasions. The rest just accumulate in my closets, plotting my demise.

Well my loafer buddies REALLY had to go. The soles had deep gouges in them and the heels were worn down. The stitching on the top was coming undone and fraying badly. They looked like I took them out of a trash heap. I couldn't in good conscious purchase any more shoes until I seriously took stock of what I had and got rid of the crap.

Here's the result:

8 pairs are going to Goodwill (Several of these I NEVER wore. One pair, I don't even remember buying.)
1 pair went to Donna because they were too big for me. AND...
23 pairs went into the trash.

Yes...TWENTY-THREE.

So all told, I purged 32 pairs of shoes from my closets. That's a lot o' shoes.

I did, however, purchase 6 pairs of shoes over the weekend to replace what got thrown out. I think for me I have to start choosing quality over quantity with shoes. I can't buy the $15 shoes at Target or Payless anymore. I'm not saying I'm going to start spending $400 on a pair of shoes. I can't (and won't) do that. But $60, yeah. This is what's nice about stores like Famous Footwear. You can buy $75-$100 shoes for $40-$60. So that's what I did. I'm so looking forward to my new purchases! These, these and these in particular.