Poll of the Day > Should shoe sellers sell single shoes?

(+) Yeah! (+)

It seems unfair to me that people with a leg/foot amputation have to buy two shoes when they only need a specific one. I know there are specialized places they can order from online but wouldn't it be easier for them to be able to just go buy them at any shoe store?

No. It sucks for the amputee but what is a shoe store supposed to do with all those unsold half-pairs? They pay their supplier for a pair, so they're going to pass that cost onto the customer. How much of a discount could they give if they need to recoup the cost from their suppliers?

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Seems to make more sense for there to be a buyback program for amputees. Like maybe they can get fitted at a shoe store and buy their shoe, and the customer or the store sells the unused shoe back to the supplier.

tbh they probably already have a process for this. Seems like something they'd deal with on a semi-regular basis. Curious what they do.

I bet there's a Facebook group or whatever for amputees where a customer buys a pair and then posts the unused shoe to the group to donate/swap

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Boom

https://www.amputee-coalition.org/resources/shoe-exchanges/

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Right, things like that exist but it would be undeniably easier to just go into a store and pay half price and leave. Shouldn't people with impairments be given some help and not have things made more complicated for them than they already are? Like handicap parking spaces, they don't NEED to exist but it's good that they do.

Handicap spaces don't cost anything beyond their original construction, and maybe some upkeep, but that upkeep would be performed with routine lot maintenance anyway.

You're proposing a business basically burn money to ease the burden on a fraction of their customer base. It doesn't make sense from a business standpoint. I understand where you're coming from and agree it would be nice to have something like that happen, but I'm not willing to go so far as to suggest they should.

Now that I've looked into it, it would be cool if they advertised their own shoe exchange and/or collaborated with some established shoe exchange. That way, the customer would pay for a pair, and they'd get a pair they could actually use.

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I ran into a similar issue buying airpods for my mom, who's totally deaf in one ear. Sadly, there wasn't any way to buy just one pod, but I really didn't expect there to be. That's a very niche demand that stores aren't in a good position to deal with. If that's going to happen, it needs to be at the supplier end, particularly since so much of the cost of actually selling the product comes from the distribution chain and not the item itself, and even then you aren't going to see the savings you might expect because the item itself isn't the whole cost.

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and then the store has one shoe they will probably never sell
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