1

This completely cracks me up. I wrote about my retail experience, it didn’t even occur to me that I’d be inundated with recommendations for shoes!

I did get a good number of people commiserating with me, telling me how everything’s locked behind glass at the chain drugstores, how online shopping is better, but those e-mails were dwarfed by those recommending shoes. With ATTITUDE!

I guess I didn’t make it clear enough… I wanted to buy Skechers because they’re slip-ons and cheap. Skechers is a mid-level brand at best.

As for top of the line…

Have you been to a Nike store recently? Nike, and now all its competitors, makes a shoe for every activity. Literally. A shoe for the missionary position and a shoe for doggy. Really, it’s that extreme.

As for which one you should buy…

Most people default to a running shoe, because of its snazzy looks and thick foam sole. But it might be the completely wrong shoe for the activity they’re doing.

Now in the old days, in the seventies, when Nike started, running shoes were just about all they sold. They eventually got into tennis, to compete with the Adidas Stan Smith, but…if you weren’t buying Chuck Taylors, you purchased a running shoe.

And Nike eclipsed Adidas and its perennial number two, Puma.

The Oregon company trumpeted breakthroughs. First, the waffle sole…which were actually designed using a waffle iron…and then air cushioning.

And then Nikes, et al, became everyday footwear and the market exploded.

Kind of like jeans. We couldn’t even wear them to school. You definitely didn’t wear them in restaurants. So there were the usual brands…Levi’s, Wrangler and Lee were the big three.

But as jeans crept into everyday life, the upscale designer jean took hold. To the point where today there are a plethora of jeans styles available. Skin tight, wide…it’s hard to keep track of what’s in fashion.

As people started to wear athletic footwear everywhere, new brands got into the game, like L.A. Gear, never mind the amplification of Reebok’s business, and the majors doubled-down. Shoes were a fashion item, but now with all the revenue, traditional players could grow their portfolio.

So…

I always bought the top of the line Nike. Period. It was a running shoe and  I wore them 24/7. I had Adidas Roms back in the early seventies… But they kind of proved the point. With a gum sole, if you used them on the tennis court, they wore out very quickly.

And even a pair of Puma banana shoes. Be the first on your block, I was!

And before that, I had a pair of Tigers, now called ASICS, when NO ONE could buy them, they were exotic.

But after a number of pairs of top of the line Nike running shoes, “Consumer Reports” gave a rave review to Brooks, with its varus wedge.

And then… “Consumer Reports” went deep, acknowledged what the companies were doing, making so many different models for so many different uses, and they pointed out which shoe was the correct for each use, and told you which shoe to buy in that category.

One big point they made is that if you are walking, do not buy a running shoe. A running shoe has a higher heel. And, a walking shoe needs to have a stiffer sole, because with running and walking you strike the pavement differently.

And for walking, which was my main use, they pointed to this one specific Nike.

But being Nike, they updated that shoe every year, with different tech innovations. And I bought them and…then they got cheap and then they stopped making them, so…

Going back to “Consumer Reports,” doing more research on the now available internet, it was declared by the experts that the definitive walking shoe was the New Balance 928. And I bought them.

They are not expensive, but they’re not cheap either. Right now they retail for $159.99 and it’s hard to get a discount.

Presently, it’s the 928v3. That’s right, the third version of the same model, and I’ve had all three. The second one was a bit narrow, but the third is back to the standard. And unlike Nikes, New Balance shoes do not fall apart. Then again, because of this you may not realize that the foam in the sole is compressed and therefore you need a new pair. I realized this was true when I went to BottleRock with an old pair, figuring they’d get dirty, and then donned a new pair thereafter. Night and day! As a matter of fact, I just bought a brand new pair of 928v3’s for the same excursion as the Skechers. But unlike the Skechers, you can’t slip them off and on, not without reaching down and holding the heel open.

So…

2

Now if you ride the lift and ask your companion how they like their skis, they will universally tell you THEY LOVE THEM! I have never ever found this rule to be broken. Literally every person I’ve ever asked about their skis testifies, emphatically.

But I figured out the answer back in the sixties… THEY PAID FOR THEM! Furthermore, they probably haven’t been on anything else. And believe me, every ski has a different character.

I checked when I was in Vail, I’ve got eleven pairs of skis. So when I’m riding the lift and someone asks me about what I’m on, I give them a full-blown review, which is usually more information than they want. But believe me, there is no ski that is great in everything. As a matter of fact, I’ve got a pair that are bad on the groomers, too stiff for the bumps, but in corn snow, THEY’RE GENIUS!

And skis make a huge difference. Not that most people know, because they’ve only skied on one or two brands at most.

Probably the most popular ski these days is the Nordica Enforcer, which I consider to be blah. As a matter of fact, the shop guy I mentioned yesterday refused to sell them because they were so mediocre. Ultimately, he stocked a few so if someone came in he could say he carried them, but he usually steered them into a Stockli or K2.

The Nordica Enforcer is stiff and dead. Two layers of titanal (not titanium, just a specific kind of aluminum alloy). You can’t out-ski them. Meaning no matter how fast you go, they won’t start to flop around. Concomitantly, with said stiffness they’re much harder to turn and much less playful than the competition, and the stiffness in the bumps… An expert skier can ski on anything, but why do all that work? I like a more lively ski.

Which is all to say most people e-mailing about their shoe of choice haven’t done a ton of research, they haven’t owned every brand, they just bought what’s on their feet and THEY LOVE THEM!

Forget getting the right shoe for the right use. They look good. They’re fashionable. They’re HIP!

Like ON shoes. You know, the ones with the soles with the cut-outs, they’re everywhere. They are not cheap, but they are ubiquitous. And they are good shoes. And they make a few models. But are you using the right shoe for your activity? I doubt it!

And then there are the HOKAs. The hip shoe before the Ons. Good shoes. Famous for their thick foam cushioning and flashy colors. But almost everybody I see in HOKAs is wearing a running shoe. And at this point, HOKA does make a walking shoe:

https://www.hoka.com/en/us/mens-walking/

(They make women’s walking shoes too.)

But these are not the ones with the flashiest of colors. Those are the running shoes, which everybody buys, because they like the look. Fashion.

But people bought them and therefore they’re the best, THEY LIKE THEM!

And then there are the kiziks. I can’t tell you how many people e-mailed me about the kiziks, because like the Skechers (some Skechers, not all), they are truly hands-free slip-ons, which the Ons and HOKAs are not… You may be able to slip into them, but compared to a Skecher or kizik…

But I said in my piece I was looking for a mid-level shoe. For a specific purpose. Like I said above, I just bought a new pair of New Balance 928v3s for $159.99. The Kiziks you want cost  up to $200 a pair. And the dirty little secret is as easy as they might be to get on, their forte is not cushioning. They do sell two sub-hundred dollar shoes, but those are truly casual items, you don’t want to do a lot of walking in them. Once again, you CAN! They’re just not the best tool for the job.

Which brings me back to the Skechers.

3

Arch Fit.

What is that about. It’s a stabilization shoe. Sounds like something your podiatrist would recommend, but…are you a pronator?

Most people don’t know. But a pronator… Go to a store, just by looking at the soles of your shoes a qualified salesman can tell you. To make it simple, very simple, you’re rolling off your big toe, which is probably why your feet hurt!

But with a stabilization shoe…

I found this out by accident. Because the top of the line Nike running shoes back in the nineties were all stabilization shoes. They embedded a piece of plastic in the sole to hold your foot straight, a little cage. And they WORKED!

Which was why I was interested in the Skecher Arch Fit shoes. Because I am a pronator and it makes a difference.

So after writing my screed yesterday I went to the Skechers site and…

It was incomprehensible.

I wanted a cushiony shoe with Arch Fit. All those people you see walking in those thick foam-soled shoes, almost none of them have stabilization, they’re made for running, not walking, and therefore your ankle can roll and you can fall and…

The Skechers site has a shoe finder. But the problem is the results it generates are either too broad or too narrow. And it will also populate the results with shoes that don’t fit your criteria… They want you to buy SOMETHING, they don’t want you to leave their site empty-handed.

But I just couldn’t figure it out, I kept changing the criteria and that’s when I saw anything you bought on the site was 20% off. And Skechers are cheap to begin with. Now in the store there was no discount…

But I didn’t want to buy them directly from Skechers, how long would it take to get them? I use Amazon Prime, and get things sometimes the same day, usually only a day or two later. But I didn’t want to pay full price.

And that’s when I found out NO ONE sells Skechers for full price online, EVERYBODY gives you a discount! But, once again, what model to buy.

It’s a whole new set of criteria on Amazon, and I’m completely flummoxed and about to give up when I stumble upon what seems to be the perfect thing. The Men’s Go Walk Arch Fit 2.0-Grand. They were selling like hotcakes, which is a good sign. Over a hundred a month, with 722 reviews.

You want the one everybody else does. It’s tried and true.

And I put them in my cart, but…

There were two other walking shoes, with many fewer sales, what about them?

I’m thorough, like I told you.

So I went back to the Skechers site. On the Skechers site, the shoes had almost the identical descriptions, I could not figure out the difference.

So…

It was time to Google. And sometimes this works, and sometimes it does not. I asked “Skechers Go Walk Arch Fit 2.0 Grand or Simplicity.”

And lo and behold, AI came up with a lengthy answer. And everything was identical until the very bottom. You can adjust the laces with the Simplicity, you can’t with the Grand!

What are the odds the store clerk knew this?

ZERO!

I won’t even trouble you with the width issue… Not only do you not want to buy wide if you’re medium, but you don’t want a relaxed fit if you want to walk in them. That’s right, it’s that complicated.

So I bought the Simplicity. And what did this purchase cost me?

Before tax?

$73.50. 30% off the list price of $105.00.

As you can see, these shoes are not even half the price of the ones everybody was e-mailing me about. And unlike them, these are cheap shoes that are machine washable… And they’ve got stability and good cushioning and you can SLIP THEM ON!

Which is why I was looking at Skechers to begin with!

A must-listen!

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/jon-batiste/id1316200737?i=1000729683233

https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/9ff4fb19-54d4-41ae-ae7a-8a6f8d3dafa8/episodes/80ce0633-5e67-4a18-b1d0-ad3cf9ec797e/the-bob-lefsetz-podcast-jon-batiste

There’s nothing I hate more than physical retail.

Mostly it’s an OCD thing… I’ve got to find the perfect thing. If it’s clothing, it’s got to fit exactly right and…

At this point I do all my shopping online. Where I can do research ad infinitum. Too much, but at least I get what I want. I know, I know, you can return stuff, but that’s a pain in the rear end.

As for settling for good enough…THA’TS NOT ME! I need the best. And the best isn’t always even more expensive, you just need to know what to buy.

And I always buy the best footwear. Nike. Now New Balance. No imitation for me, no equivalent to Thom McAn instead of Stride Rite, if you can remember your single digit days.

So…

I’m going somewhere where I need slip-on shoes. I’ve got to take them off and put them back on multiple times. So, I decided to investigate Skechers… It’s a mid- level brand, then again it’s become a juggernaut and I’ve seen all those ads where you can step on the heel and slide right in.

They don’t make those anymore. But I didn’t find this out until I went to the retail store and they told me.

Now they make slip-ons, but not the crunch slip-ons, they haven’t made those for two and a half years. Are they coming back? The help wasn’t sure.

So let’s get this straight… I drove to the physical store because I wasn’t sure exactly what size I was in Skechers. And like I said above, I don’t want to go through the buy and return process online.

So… It’s late in the afternoon, there’s no one there. Well, one customer. As for help? Nowhere to be seen!

But after waiting the better part of ten minutes, a guy shows up and I ask him what’s the difference is between all the shoes.

And he asks me what I’m going to use them for…

A reasonable question. I say walking, I want a cushy sole.

Let the games begin!

They’ve got a zillion styles. And this guy can’t tell me the difference.

Finally I decide to do it by process of elimination. Try on two different models, pick the better one, then compare that one to the next one until I find the one I want.

He disappeared for so long I think he went to the factory to get them, but he eventually came back and I found out the sneakers were true to size, and I liked the cushioning in one better.

Great.

Then he left me to take care of a sale. Which he was still doing when I exited the store twenty minutes later. I mean how hard is it to do? You swipe your card and..?

And now a woman comes out of the back. She’s wearing the Skechers shirt, but she’s not coming over to me.

So I go over to her.

And I start asking her the difference between the shoes…

And that’s when I realize she knows less than the first guy.

And I’m thinking they’re not that expensive, and the first ones worked, but I was interested in their arch support shoes, for stability and I told this woman and she spoke in gobbledygook, I mean some shoes said Arch Fit right on them! So I just pointed to a pair to try them on.

Hmm… I’m not sure if I need the arch support or not. But one thing is for sure, I want a shoe with more cushioning than this one.

She says they don’t have any. Huh? I can see them all on the wall.

But she says they’re all wides…

Then again, that’s what the first guy said before he brought out the right ones, that they only had them in wide, which is too wide for me.

And all this time I’m trying to go to the website on my phone. But I’m in a mall and there’s no access. Says they have wi-fi, but good luck connecting.

Meanwhile, the music is blasting so loud I can barely communicate with these people. Then again, they did play the Spinners’ “Rubberband Man,” so it wasn’t a complete loss.

Then I’d had too much, I was overloaded. I was going to have to go home and study the website, and buy them from there, if at all. I mean at least online they’ve got all the INVENTORY! (And these definitely weren’t commission salespeople.)

What do I always tell you?

DISTRIBUTION IS KING! No matter how good it is, if you can’t buy it, it doesn’t matter.

CVS? Walgreens? You’re better off buying from Amazon, because they’ve got all the items in stock!

As for the help… They don’t pay anybody so no one is any good.

I go to this ski shop in Vail that charges top dollar. You can save $75 to $100 on everything if you want to. They go by MSRP, “Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price,” as opposed to MAP, “Minimum Advertised Price.” Even the websites of the manufacturers go by MAP.

However, at this shop the employees are lifers. They don’t stock everything, only what’s right. I went against the salesman’s advice once, I’ll never do that again. He sold both products, but the other one was better for me.

As for the people who mount the bindings… Lifers.

The tuner? He worked on the World Cup.

Now, like shoes, maybe you don’t need the best, maybe adequate is good enough for you. Then again, you may not have experienced the best to know the difference.

But most retail outlets won’t pay the help an adequate wage because the public will go across the street for a penny, take another airline if it’s ten dollars less, even if it took a hundred dollars to get to the damn airport. You’ve got to pay for service, and no one wants to.

So what we’ve got is stores with incomplete inventory and ignorant help. You waste your time and good luck getting what you want.

I was in Lululemon in Vail buying some shorts. I wanted to try the next size up to compare. No, they didn’t have odd number sizes, only evens, that’s what they told me. But I just got an e-mail from Lululemon telling me shorts were back in stock and I clicked through and found OF COURSE they make them in odd sizes, it’s just that the store in Vail didn’t stock them!

That’s what made Tower Records so great. The breadth of inventory, they didn’t only stock the greatest hits album.

As for streaming…

There used to be a rare records business. Out of print stuff. Stuff that no retailer would stock. But online, almost all of that stuff is just a click away on a streaming music service, and if not there, on YouTube. Sure, you don’t have the physical product, but at this point in time… Collecting is so last century, today it’s about access and experiences. There’s no reason to build a monument to yourself.

Now the truth is malls are dying left and right. My experience tells you why.

The news tells us there’s been an uptick in retail shopping after lockdown, but…

I just don’t get it.

Then again, I never saw shopping as a sport, as entertainment.

Shopping is just another way in which the internet has eclipsed the physical world.

Then again, there’s a good story in today’s “New Yorker” about Cory Doctorow’s new book about ensh*ttification:

http://bit.ly/4mGiLG1

Which I find worst on Amazon. The site is littered with ads and Amazon’s Choice is not always the best and in truth most of the company’s profits come from AWS, Amazon Web Services, to the point that the guy who ran that, Andy Jassy, now runs all of Amazon, he replaced Bezos. Furthermore, Amazon makes more money selling third party products than their own.

So a good thing never lasts.

I want to give you my money, can you just make it a bit easier?

But you’re squeezing every last dollar out of the business, which makes me hate you.

I mean I go into the ski shop, I have a relationship with the help. They don’t rip me off for knicks and knacks.

But I’m paying for that service.

I’m going to delve into the Skechers site now, wish me luck!

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74mV9qwlCgg

Chalk one up for Aerosmith. The band that too many saw as imitators of the Rolling Stones have trumped the English band with their latest release, it’s got the energy of hard rock in a way nothing on “Hackney Diamonds” does.

Then again, where do you put the Stones these days, which slot? They’re not Top Forty, they appeal to the oldsters who always bought their records.

But Aerosmith… Wasn’t Steven Tyler supposedly retired? But then he’s singing here and there, like at the Ozzy tribute, where YUNGLBUD appeared in his breakthrough moment.

You start to feel it, a name keeps coming across the transom, and it reached fever pitch for YUNGBLUD after that July show.

Not that the average person knows who YUNGBLUD is, BUT THAT’S JUST THE POINT!

Hell, I didn’t even know this single was out until I was reading Ryan Downey’s Substack newsletter which told me it had gone to number one. HUH?

But Active Rock is a backwater. It very rarely cross-pollinates with the Spotify Top 50. This is not the era of MTV, where all genres sat side by side.

As for Active Rock… It’s HARD ROCK! Bang your head for real rock. And I’d like to tell you to tune in an Active Rock station but unless you’re a dedicated fan, you’re going to be turned off by most of the material. It derives from Metallica more than Led Zeppelin. It’s noisy and angry, JUST LIKE MY ONLY ANGEL!

I guess that’s the point. Consciously or unconsciously Aerosmith and YUNGBLUD didn’t make a song for everybody, but those in the Active Rock ghetto.

How do I know it’s a ghetto? According to “Billboard,” “My Only Angel” had only two million streams last week and it went to number one on the Hard Rock Songs chart. To put that in perspective, Laufey’s song “From the Start” sits at #50 in the U.S. Spotify Top 50, with 520,502 streams A DAY! And that’s only one service!

Now hard rockers have shot themselves in the foot, they’ve agitated ad infinitum against streaming, and it is now hurting them. Scratch a hard rock listener and they’ll tell you streaming sucks and it doesn’t pay.

But it does… At least more than no listens at all!

Then again, how big a sphere is hard rock in today’s world?

I guess that’s one of my points. One thing about Steven Tyler, HE CAN SING! (Well, at least historically and here, how often and how well on the road…I don’t know.) And that separates him from almost everybody else on the Active Rock chart. And that means if you were a fan of the old hard rock, which was heavy but not necessarily fast and screaming, you might like this.

And if it were the old days, MTV would have played “My Only Angel.”

Is it the best track I’ve ever heard? No. But the litmus test is whether you want to hear it again, and I did.

Having said that…

This is music made for old school stereos. With POWER! And clarity. This stuff doesn’t sound good on earbuds.

I listened first via Spotify on my Genelec computer speakers. The chorus stood out, but the verses blended together in noise.

So I fired up Qobuz and listened in hi-res and suddenly the vocal was more prominent. Ditto on Amazon hi-res.

But still…

This is when I fired up the big rig. With enough power to wake up the neighborhood. And when the sound came out of the speakers…

This was the experience of yore, being surrounded by music, having the noise of life squeezed out.

So…

“My Only Angel” is niche. Everything is niche today. Even Taylor Swift. There’s mania over her new album, but do you care? Do you care about Alex Warren? K-pop?

If you read the music trade press you do. Where the major labels have manipulated the charts into irrelevance. Hell, the newspapers that still exist don’t even publish the top ten anymore, because WHO CARES?

So we read about this label exec and that promoting pop and hip-hop dreck that makes it to the Spotify Top 50, but has no meaning.

But Aerosmith is from a different era. The second generation of rock, influenced by and taking off from the first, the Beatles and the Stones. When the goal wasn’t brand extension, but sex and drugs. Sure, you wanted to make money, but the music and the lifestyle were superior.

So…

Check out “My Only Angel.” If you don’t like it, no biggie. You don’t like most stuff and neither do I! But don’t be under the illusion that anyone cares about your opinion, that you don’t like stuff. The bottom line is…do some people like something enough for its makers to have a career?

And everybody knows that it’s about careers. More than momentary hits. If you’ve got a catalog of albums that fans adore, even if most tracks are unknown by most, then you can tour forever. And in today’s world, starting from zero, if you build it on the road and it grows…it never falters, because it’s not hit dependent.

So that’s the world we live in today. One of the Weeknd and Sabrina Carpenter and the rest of the acts with press and attention who oftentimes work with producers like Max Martin where the act is fungible. That’s right, Max can create a hit with ANYBODY! A modern day Mutt Lange. So when you have a hit with him… I’d like to see you do it with someone else!

But although Aerosmith has worked with different producers, one thing is for sure, it’s about them, they are in control, they always sound like themselves.

And “My Only Angel” sounds like Aerosmith.

This would have been a big deal in the pre-internet era.

As for working with YUNGBLUD…this doesn’t look like rockers making disco tracks in the late seventies, but a marriage of the old and new while sticking to your roots.

This collaboration may not be featured in all the news outlets printing what PR people serve up to them, but the truth is today’s world is all about word of mouth, spreading. That’s what happened with YUNGBLUD. How far will the word on “My Only Angel” spread? I DON’T KNOW! But that doesn’t matter, because the metrics have changed, it’s almost a return to the early seventies when having an AM hit was unnecessary to have cred and a career. You’re making your music for your audience. You want to satiate them. Not necessarily giving them what they want, but with them in mind. You don’t need cowriters, you don’t need remixes, you don’t need to polish the turd into slickness, you can leave it rough such that…

When you go to the show and they play this music you nod your head and smile and feel good.

This is the essence of the rock experience. When it was about what was in your ears as opposed to what was on screen, big time production.

I don’t want to oversell “My Only Angel”…I’ll just say in an era when most classic rockers have given up making new music, believing no one cares, and others are making new music that’s a far cry from the old, Aerosmith has somehow delivered just what they used to. “My Only Angel” is not a retread, it’s new, but it sounds like the band. And YUNGBLUD is just a dollop of guacamole upon the chip.

This is the future.

Instead of thinking about everybody, think about yourself and your audience and career. Stick to your guns.

And BE GOOD!

And that’s a very high bar for most to hurdle.