Scuffed shoes and a scuffed-up nation

Dec 10, 2021 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Kaieteur News – Part of a columnist’s job is to observe the patterns and trends going on in society. Sometimes, this involves sitting on a bench looking at people going past. Other times it means riding the minibus back and forth listening to the conversation (at great peril to one’s life). Some of you are no doubt saying it sounds like I have nothing to do with my life. Maybe you are right. But I do notice things. And I do write about them. And I do get paid for it.
One worrying trend I see is that young professionals are not shining their shoes. This troubled me for a while. Clearly it was not out of disregard for their appearance. They all wore crisply pressed clothes and sported fashionable hairstyles. In fact, this made their shoes, dull and badly scuffed, stand out even more. Neither could it be from want of time. Shining shoes with modern polish takes less than five minutes, and thereafter just a few seconds brushing to maintain.
One group is an exception to this pattern. Uniformed personnel – security guards, soldiers, police – sport shoes so shiny you can see your reflection in them clear enough to shave. Some of them wear patent leather but a great many put in the effort and take pride in their shoes. Some may ascribe this to personal discipline, but I think it more likely that regular uniform inspection is part of their job.
This gives us a clue as to why no one else is shining their shoes. They face no judgment for not doing so. If anything, people may tell them their shoes look old and they will go out and buy new ones. This throwaway culture is unnecessary – a pair of shoes, cared for and polished, can last and look good for years. It has created perverse business incentives – why sell a customer one pair of good shoes every five years when you can flog them a new pair, held together with just a little glue, that will last two years and that they will replace because it won’t take a shine and isn’t presentable. The poor customer is blameless in this – when people have only the barest amount of cash on hand, they are in no position to consider the long-term financial economics of something as trivial as a shoe purchase.
This practice, called planned obsolescence, has become rampant. Shoes, household appliances, printers, phones, televisions – all examples of products built to fail or not allow maintenance. Countries have cottoned on and begun to introduce laws against it, but these are next to impossible to enforce. Companies will parrot the same line – making products this way makes them more affordable to the customer. “In the short run”, they forget to add.
Customers may be reluctant to demand change for other reasons. The middle class, normally extremely vocal when they feel they are being shortchanged, has been brought onside. Businesses have launched campaigns, through ads and promotions, to “make shopping fun”. This is now a major social activity. It is fast becoming entertainment – one very well-known store blasts music at full volume outside its premises. Products failing faster means you get a chance to buy more often, to go shopping and show off your new goods.
This, my fellow Guyanese is consumer culture. It is the natural result of the neoliberal policies we have pursued for the past three decades. It is a sick, twisted society where principles are sacrificed at the altar of profit, and believe me we have only just begun, in these few decades, to sink below the surface of the consumerist tide. As we go under the oil slick, and the water closes over our heads, we shall find ourselves in a dark place indeed. But more on that in a future column.
You may have found this column slightly disjointed, jumping from topic to topic, from shoeshine to planned obsolescence to consumer culture. But this is the job of a columnist – to observe society, to look at the mundane and follow to chains of causation and discover the real maladies afflicting society. So, keep your eyes open as you go about your day. You may be surprised what you see in other people’s shoes. Or maybe I just have nothing to do with my life. You decide.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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Scuffed shoes and a scuffed-up nation

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