Footwear doesn’t work anymore, either.
My dirt-cheap made-in-China slippers have given up the ghost and I need a new pair. I was going to go to Walmart and try to find one–because every shoe store you ever heard of, where you could try something on before buying it, no longer exists. Thom McCann, Florsheim, Marmax, Pay-Less… all gone, all part of a lost world. A world where things actually worked.
But Patty wanted to order me a pair, via amazon.com. All right. Wait some days, slippers finally arrive–and there’s just no way they fit. Way too narrow.
(Can I say “dagnabbit”? Or “dudburnit”?)
So we sent it back and she ordered a pair from somewhere else. Got those yesterday. Again, not even close to fitting. It says Size 10 on the label… but you know how they lie. Famous name-brand slippers: ideal for the feet of giant insects.
Today she has ordered from yet another name-brand company. She specified “wide.” I wonder if they understand what that word means. “Wide compared to a strand of linguini”? “Wide” if you think you’re looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope? Frankly, I’ll be amazed if this pair fits.
Break out the duct tape and try to get a few more weeks out of the old broken-down cheap slippers.
We live in The Age Of Nothing Works. Can’t even get a pair of slippers.
Same thing with jeans. Three pairs of jeans, all labeled the same size, all three different sizes — and only one of them even remotely wearable. Maybe slave labor (or foreign labor, which is often the same thing) doesn’t produce things to our uniquely American ideal of mass-production standardization.
“Made in the USA”–in your dreams.