Last year the shoelace on my black Converse snapped. I was in London, and had no idea where exactly I should go, but walking around I came to a convenience store that had, well, everything. I laced up the shoes and continued. It became apparent that they were too long. I had clown laces. I needed to get some replacements, as well as some nice new white laces, so I thought “surely the internet can tell me which length I should get.” And indeed it did. But this was the search result:
Step up your sneaker game with our ultimate guide to Converse shoelace lengths.
That’s have the modern shill-pitch cliches in one sentence. The target market is suppose to consider their sneaker game, and whether it can be stepped up. Having decided that they can, indeed, elevate this all-important personality characteristic, they are not just offered a guide, but the ultimate guide.
Lacing up your Converse sneakers should be a reflection of your personal style and comfort.
Oh absolutely. I am all about the style, personally, and want my personal style to be admired by all, so I will indeed be lacing up, yes sir, confident everyone’s eyes will drop like lead balls when I enter a room, that my laces might be judged.
The entry for my particular shoe, the All-Star Low Top - which, I should note, is a reflection of my personal style, and whose unique hue was the result of a decision to A) obtain sneaker game, and B) subsequently step it up - says:
7 pairs of eyelets here mean 140cm (55″) laces will do the trick.
The picture of the shoe, which is accurate and matches my own, shows seven pairs of eyelets. This seems at odds with another site, considerably more sober, which suggests 36 – 45 inches. Converse sells them for $3.00. The site I was quoting sells them for around $20, but to be fair, they’re leather, and have garish gold tips that tell everyone your personal style game has been upped.
LATER Went to Walgreen’s for laces. I also needed some paper towels. The shelf where one might find a paper towel of the quality and quantity preferred is now filled with pictures of the paper towels. You can push a button and someone will come over, listen to what you want, then get it from the back room. This also applies to dish soap, laundry detergent, and so on.
I assume this is a corporate policy, and not specifically related to this store, because I don’t think they have a big thievery problem. People in this neighborhood have jobs and they buy things, instead of stealing them and selling them online.
Oh look - a sale on peanuts. I will buy some peanuts.
After touring the entire store, and not finding any shoelaces, I went to the check-out and said “I give up. I’ve been all over. I can’t find the shoelaces.”
“We don’t have any shoelaces, ” Said the clerk, with a tone I can best describe “it’s crazy, I know.”
“That might be why I can’t find them,” I said.
“We used to have them. Someone called the other day to ask if we did, and I had to say we didn’t.”
I put the peanuts back, did not buy shoelaces, did not buy paper towels, and left the store thinking: this will happen again, and again, until I just . . . never go there again for anything.
I’m sure this decision was made on high, and they swapped out the valuable four square feet of endcap space with something that has bigger margins, and all the projections would show how much more money the replacement merchandise made. But apparently it never occurs to them to calculate the money lost by people who came in for shoelaces, didn’t pick up anything else, and permanently scratched the store off their list as a place where you’re likely to find the small, essential things for modern life.
Our weekly recap of a Wikipedia peregrination. Expect no conclusion or revelations, but if you've been with us since this started last year, you know . . . sometimes we learn interesting things.
I mentioned the H & H switch a long time back, and said I’d get to it later in a Here-to-There. I have no idea what I was intending to say.
Here’s an H&H ad for all the work they did in Chicago. Perhaps I was going to track down the buildings and see if they still exist today. I’m sure they do.
Narrator: they do not, in fact, all still exist today. But:
The company exists to this day as the Arrow Hart division of Cooper Industries, which was bought by Eaton Corp. in 2012 for $11.8 billion.
Prior to the purchase:
Cooper Industries was founded in 1833 by brothers Charles and Elias Cooper.Cooper's initial product offerings included plows, hog troughs, kettles and stoves. By the mid-nineteenth century the company was concentrating on steam engines.
You can imagine ol’ Charles and Elias waking up a century later and learning that their hog-trough firm had been valued at one-third the entire Gross Domestic Product of the US for 1833.
As for Eaton, I’ve always liked their logo. I know of the company, but little about it.
In 1911, Joseph O. Eaton, brother-in-law Henning O. Taube and Viggo V. Torbensen, incorporated the Torbensen Gear and Axle Co. in Bloomfield, New Jersey. With financial backing from Torbensen's mother, the company was set to manufacture Torbensen's patented internal-gear truck axle.
You’re thinking there must be a pretty good reason the Eaton Company isn’t called the Torbensen Company. Or Viggo-Vee.
In 1917, Republic Motor Truck Company, Torbensen's largest customer bought out the company. But Eaton and Torbensen were not content and bowed out of Republic to form the Eaton Axle Company in 1919.
Ah. I suspect that Mr. E was the go-getter and Torbensen was the inventor. Mr. Eaton might have been expected to go in a direction other than business, considering that his dad was . . . .
Joseph Oriel Eaton, an American painter of portraits and figure subjects, both in oil and in water-colours, was born in 1829. His most famous work is his portrait of Herman Melville, author of the 1851 novel Moby-Dick.
It gets better: his mother was the great-granddaughter of John Adams. So we have some American lineage here.
Even better:
Daughter, Margaret, married to Swedish Count Henning Gustave Taube, who was a co-founder of Eaton Corporation and brother of Swedish Prime Minister Arvid Taube.
What? Arvid wasn’t the prime minister. He was the foreign minister. The previous wikipedia entry is wrong!
WIKIPEDIA IS WRONG!
Which I knew off the top of my head, of course.
Anyway: A work by Eaton.
Melville. And that's how we got from one place to the other.
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