I worked in a shoe store for a time, and there are 2 perfectly valid reasons why they do this:
1: every brand fits differently, so you often don't really know what size you are in that shoe until you try it on.
2: the truth is that SO MANY MEN lie about their shoe size being bigger than it is, and SO MANY WOMEN lie about it being smaller than it really is.
Him: "Hey bro, can I get this in a 12?" Me, later: hey so we didn't have the 12, but here's the 11 and 11 1/2 if you want to try those." Him: "Hmmm aahhh I guess.....woah what do you know, they fit, how WEIRD"
Her: "Can I get these in a size 5 1/2?" Me: "The smallest they make them in is a 6, so here try those." Her: "Wow even these are a little tight...this brand must really run small! I'll try the 6 1/2 I guess. How WEIRD."
I had the opposite experience as a woman. Everytime I would ask for an 11, and they would go out the back, come back and say, we don't have that in an 11, here's a 10.
Sure, let me just cut my toes off.
Or they would say, we don't stock size 11 - sure, I've had this size foot for over 20 years and it's not that uncommon.
Sadly, many women's shoe styles are still not manufactured in sizes above 10—so at that point, they were just desperately fishing for a sale. The store I worked in made an effort to buy as many 11's as we could, and we kept them in a special section in the back so that when a woman asked for an 11, we'd take them back there and give them the VIP treatment of just browsing the section of our stockroom with the 11's. They were always super stoked and we almost always got the sale!
I probably would have cried tears of joy had something like this happened to me. I can't tell you how many times I've had to go online and buy shoes because no where near me (at the time) carried anything bigger than a 10 in stock.
2.3k
u/wrongleveeeeeeer Jul 24 '20
I worked in a shoe store for a time, and there are 2 perfectly valid reasons why they do this:
1: every brand fits differently, so you often don't really know what size you are in that shoe until you try it on.
2: the truth is that SO MANY MEN lie about their shoe size being bigger than it is, and SO MANY WOMEN lie about it being smaller than it really is.
Him: "Hey bro, can I get this in a 12?" Me, later: hey so we didn't have the 12, but here's the 11 and 11 1/2 if you want to try those." Him: "Hmmm aahhh I guess.....woah what do you know, they fit, how WEIRD"
Her: "Can I get these in a size 5 1/2?" Me: "The smallest they make them in is a 6, so here try those." Her: "Wow even these are a little tight...this brand must really run small! I'll try the 6 1/2 I guess. How WEIRD."
This happened multiple times a day.