Especially for shoe...

Little shoe anecdote. No not an anecdote about little shoes, but one about buying normal sized shoes. Size 39 to be exact.

So, I was browsing in Minelli, a semi-expensive quasi-Italian shoe store, and I chanced upon shoe that pleased me. It was black, tiny heel (the ones that look like upside-down flattened pyramids), pointy without being vicious, with a black canvasy strap across the top, near the toe, bearing the inscription Minelli, but not in an obvious way. And, bargain-ahoy, it was on sale. OK, so shoe-ahoy! Except, woe-ahoy, it wasn't my size! Curses-ahoy. (Right, enough ahoy-ing.) The same model was available in my size in fetching lime green or apricot, but, well, exactly.

But never fear, there are hundreds of other Minellis in Paris, and I should know, as I downloaded a list from the internet, deciding to trawl through them, one by one, searching for my shoe. So, armed with my list, and a plan of Paris, I worked out my itinerary, intending to get through a good four or five Minellis on my lunch break.

(At this point it might be worth appeasing your logical query as to why, rather than launching into a Minelli marathon, I didn’t just politely ask one random Minelli shop assistant in any random Minelli branch to kindly check round the other Paris Minellis to see if any of them had my shoe in stock. Well, I did ask the aforementioned random Minelli shop assistant in a random Minelli branch, and was told that such cross-referencing was malheureusement impossible… Huh!)

So, à vos marques! Prêts? Partez! Minelli Printemps, in peach, but not black, Minelli St Lazare, in lime green, but not black, unless you have pixie feet, Minelli Passage du Havre, nuffink, Minelli Lafayette, still nuffink, Minelli Boulevard Haussmann peach, lime green, but... no black.

Curses-ahoy again. Adrenaline pumping, I hovered by the metro, wondering whether I had time to make it two stops away to Minelli Grands Boulevards. Decided to do it - nothing would stop me in my quest now. (Except boredom, and having to go back to work.) Two stops later, out into the sunlight, straight into Minelli Grands Boulevards and... chorus of angels, there were my shoes! Black, 39, on sale! Hooray! I yelped with glee, picked up the left one in the display and beckoned the good shop lady to get me the right one, explaining this was my seventh Minelli and here they were.

She got them for me, I sat down to try them on, and, as I walked about in them a bit, my certainty wavered. My heels were flopping out of them a bit, though nothing an extra sole couldn't potentially fix, but the right one was a bit scratchy, and, well, I just wasn't sure anymore. Now, remember, this was my seventh Minelli in under an hour, which is devotion for a pair of shoes, especially given my less-than-enthusiastic feelings about shopping, but I've been oh so burned by summer shoes this year, as I must have bought about ten pairs of sandals in varying styles and colours, and 90% of them are blister-inducingly unwearable.

So there I was, sitting in the shop, having taken the shoes off, and pondering whether or not to get them, and the shop lady came over, and I admitted I wasn't sure, and she promptly whipped them away from me, and packed them back into their box, and took them over to her cash till. Um, ok, then.... I was still planning on looking at them questioningly a bit longer, maybe trying them on again, and pacing up and down again, but if that's how you want to play it... Plus, I was a bit late back for work by then, anyway. I went over to her desk - and at this point, let me just spitefully, and irrelevantly, say, she was a real plumpster - and asked her if she could put them by until this evening. Now this might seem like a perfectly reasonable request, but the reply was a curt, "non, they're my only 39s left, maybe if I'd had some other pairs left, and seeing as you've already been to seven Minellis..." and she moved on to help someone else. I.e., if you don't buy them right now, I don't care, because someone else will, so don't hold your breath for any favours missy, more fool you for having been to so many other Minellis.

Well, vive customer service, eh? Nice to see, such blatant commercialism at play. Anyway, I hesitated for about five more seconds before swanning off, resolutely shoeless. And that's the last bloody Minelli I ever go into. Seven Minellis, and one too many. Big fat fatty. Lose some weight, fatto.

The End.

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