All things considered, I was fairly happy with my purchase. I say fairly, because even though I had ordered the shoes in my usual size of 8.5, they were undeniably too big for my feet. I considered exchanging the shoes; I emailed customerservice@shopadidas.com to inquire about this. They replied immediately with an automated response: Dear Valued Customer,
Thank you for contacting Customer Service at www.shopadidas.com.
Your questions and concerns are important to us and we are dedicated to assisting you in anyway possible. In order to assist you in the most efficient and timely manner, all email correspondence must be submitted through our online email form. To locate our online email form, we ask that you visit our Help Desk at Customer Service at www.shopadidas.com/helpdesk and choose Contact Us under Online Store Information. Then, choose the subject that will address your question and send us an email through our online email form.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.
Sincerely,
Customer Service at www.shopadidas.com
… Just to give you a sense of how much of an inconvenience it is to exchange shoes: After going through a maze of “help desks” and “online email forms”, I found that the only possible way for me to exchange my shoes would be to return them via UPS (i.e. pay for shipping). Adidas estimated it would take 14 days for my refund to be disbursed after the shoes arrived back at their warehouse (almost a month after they first arrived at my doorstep). From there, I could re-order the shoes in a size 8, but I would have to pay shipping fees this time around because the “free shipping on first order coupon” was a one-time offer. I would be out and extra $20, and I would be sneaker-less for a month. In the end I decided to keep the shoes that are just a tad small for my feet, and live with the remorse. “If I had only bought them in a size 8, they would be perfect.”
For my next piece, I plan on exploring the idea of “buyer’s remorse”. I’ve been reading about the effects of buyer’s remorse on the human psyche in a book called The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less by Barry Schwartz, an American psychologist and professor of social theory and social action at Swarthmore College.
In this book, Schwartz speaks about the multitude of choices we face everyday as consumers. He argues that even though we, as American consumers, may believe that more choices in the supermarket can make us happier (or, “more free”), the opposite can actually occur. We live in a society that offers millions of choices – from what brand of cereal to buy, to what majors/minors/concentrations to study in college, to what running shoes to purchase off of the Adidas website and in which colors. People tend to think that having more choices is the key to happiness and freedom; it’s only logical – the more options that present themselves the more likely we are to select the best one. Schwartz goes on to explain that this is not the case at all, from a psychological standpoint. When so many options are available, it is easy to become overwhelmed. Americans spend more time shopping than any other people in the world for precisely these reasons, and it certainly does not make us any happier. Even when we finally make those big decisions – what cereal to buy, what major to study in college, what shoes to buy off of the Adidas website – we find that we are less satisfied because we must live with the nagging question, “Could I have made a better choice?” Anyway, this is why I will be re-creating my pair of Adidas shoes out of fabric and tailoring the reproductions so that they will fit my feet exactly. I see this project as an exercise in coping with the loss of buying shoes that don’t fit me. I am looking to the artist, Rachel Whiteread, because I feel like there is something to be said about exploring the negative space of objects (in this case, the negative space is the half inch of space I feel in the toes of my Adidas sneakers, representing a sense of personal loss).
Rachel Whiteread
This is a photo I took in the studio, to document the process of creating a sewing pattern for shoes. I molded muslin to fit the contours of my feet exactly, simply by the process of wrapping and pinning. From there I can cut and trace the pattern pieces onto more muslin, and finally onto a cotton/synthetic mix fabric that will be my final piece.
Finally, I went to the deCordova museum recently. I saw Rachel Perry Welty’s exhibit, and I loved it. The pieces that stand out in my mind are the collages she made using magazine cutouts of letters to form the lyrics of songs she knows from grocery store music playlists. The piece is about the ubiquity of “grocery store songs”. In a way it reminded me of my handmade barcodes. I thought the piece where she color-coded her son’s hospital bills was really moving – the thought of injecting color into these obviously deeply insensitive and hurtful documents brought out the humanness of them. I think that in many ways Rachel Perry Welty is doing what I am starting to do in my work. Total observation hours: six.
Rachel Perry Welty
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