Word: shoe-repair
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...literally dusted off a decade-old pair of ragged black leather boots sitting in her closet and visited a shoe-repair shop for the first time in her life. For a fashion-conscious woman, the thought of recycling clothing hurt her pride a bit. "I walked in with my tail between my legs," she says. "It was something, initially, I was not proud of." Then she saw the price: $16. And the work: the boots looked as good as new. "I walked out of there going, 'O.K., all right,'" Thorsen says. She proudly wore her healed heels...
...McFarland says his year-over-year revenues rose 28% in December and 35% in January. "I'd love to see a 50% jump in February," he says. As the historian for the Shoe Service Institute of America, the cobbler trade group, McFarland tracks local media stories on shoe-repair performance and talks to hundreds of shop owners throughout the country. He says cobblers are reporting increases in the range of 25% to 40% during the fourth quarter of 2008 and early '09. (See a gallery of Olympic shoe designs...
...While the recession has helped all types of repair professions, cobblers seem to be enjoying their luck more than others. Shoe repair is a dying industry. During the Great Depression, there were some 130,000 shops in the country. Now there are only 7,000. Graying, middle-aged repairers are the Young Turks; there's a clear shortage of 20- and 30-something cobblers in today's shops. "We have a chance to reintroduce our industry," says Randy Lipson, who runs four shoe-repair shops in St. Louis, Mo. The shoes are falling off the shelves in Lipson's shops...
...dwell on it either, even though the politics of envy - once a potent weapon for Labour - has lost traction. That was the cheering message Tories could take from their May by-election victory in Crewe and Nantwich, a constituency in northwest England. Edward Timpson, heir to a shoe-repair chain, won easily there, despite a negative campaign that burlesqued him as a "Tory toff." Likewise, concludes Iain Dale, a Conservative blogger and the publisher of Total Politics magazine, Cameron's background is no longer an electoral liability: "A lot of people like the fact that Cameron is quite posh. They...
...PAST 12 YEARS, ON THE SIDEWALK next to my company's Tokyo headquarters, an elderly gentleman, Harukichi Watanabe, ran a small shoe-repair stand. Secretaries as well as corporate executives would leave their shoes each day for repair. After the poison-gas attack, I noticed on my arrival at the building that his stand was closed and flowers and gifts had been left there. I was told he had been killed in the subway disaster. To my surprise, when I picked up my copy of Time, on your index page I saw a picture of Watanabe lying on the subway...