Today’s society is, in the end, more masochistic than it has to be. Really, there must be some plausible reasoning behind the seasonal torture to which we submit ourselves—and unless you are a certain Carrie Whatserface, metropolitan chick flick heroine, this is nothing less than a dire and agonizing pain.

Shoe stores are generally among the most dank, sweat-infused atmospheres in the contemporary world, falling short of only quartering and Chinese water torture in terms of agony. Not only is it the surly, smarmy atmosphere that warrants this invective, but also the footwear purchasing process itself. Because of the necessity of trying on an indeterminate number of pairs of shoes that only God knows how many others have tried on before you, you are subjected to a good hour of this duress just for a chance at discovering that Holy Grail: a ‘good’ pair of shoes.

I believe this daunting process would be ultimately bearable were we to revert to the pre-industrial revolution tailors of yore. Perhaps part of the problem is the anonymity of it all; instead of a courteous greeting and having your measurements taken with alacrity, we are today herded into tall, ominous aisles by great and impersonal signs which decree boldly the size of footwear they watch over. It’s like a genocide; a facebook of lowly shoes which are proffered to us in a sickening display of servitude. We stride down the humid hall and decide which fate is to be sealed today, all the while being ashamed of history and progressing in the opposite direction from humility: a home-spun pair of shoes. The market for a proper shoemaker would likely be large among the alternative crowd. In a world of megalomaniacal brand names and their respective countercultures, footwear without a glaring corporate symbol would not only encourage personal style, but be remarkably cost-efficient for supplier and consumer alike.

And, in spite of the mass-produced footwear with display models that annex several walls, we’re left with some horribly improbable dilemma which seems remnant of quantum theory: as soon as you find a suitable looking pair of shoes, all the pairs in your particular size disappear from the shelves as if trying specifically to piss you off. We can’t exactly blame the surly clerks for this inconvenience, but someone must take the blame—it’s either the salespeople or the shoes themselves.

Really, short of devolution there’s not much we can do about the shoe store epidemic. Unless everyone begins wearing tissue boxes as footwear overnight, we’re relegated to the seedy aisles for yet another year.