Stabroek Business investigates the crisis of cheap and inferior school shoes imported into Guyana bringing with them misery and higher costs for parents who can ill-afford the additional financial strain of paying more for less
If you visit most of the small businesses around the city that restore and repair worn out and damaged shoes you are likely to see large quantities of new footwear, some still in the boxes in which they were bought; and if you wonder about the phenomenon of new shoes in a repair shop you would have every right to do so. The problem is that not all of the shoes that are imported into Guyana are worth the money paid for them.
It is a sore point particularly with working-class parents, who now complain ceaselessly about the brevity of the life span of the shoes that they buy for their school-aged children. Perusal of many of the shoe outlets, whether these are roadside vending operations or established business premises, indicate that school shoes can be bought at prices ranging from $1,000 and $3,000. All that glitters, however, is by no means gold. This newspaper has decided to undertake an investigation into the problems associated with cheap school shoes in view of the mounting frequency of complaints by parents regarding the frequency of repairs and replacements.
The problem, in our view, has already reached crisis proportions. Minimum-waged parents complain about new shoes that sometimes last as little as a month and about the additional costs associated with stitching and otherwise re-enforcing new shoes even before they are worn.
The most frequent complaint is associated with the separation of the sole from the rest of shoe, often within days of purchase and wearing. Those parents – and there are thousands of them – who cannot afford the much more costly brands have little choice but to acquire the inferior brands and absorb the additional costs of stitching. The problem does not end there, however. The soles are thin and fragile and develop holes at those pressure points where the rubber hits the road the hardest. Buckles and heels fall off and Velcro straps cease to be effective. A little rain – and there is much if it about in the city these days – and the flooded streets wreak havoc with the shoes, taking them apart literally at the seams to reveal insides that appear to be re-enforced with a cardboard-like material. After that, the shoes are ready for the garbage cans.
Time was when a pair of school shoes was expected to last at least an entire academic year. Parents now complain of, in some cases having to buy at least four pairs of school shoes for a single child in an academic year. It is not, at least so it seems, a problem that has been brought to the attention of the Guyana National Bureau of Standards though some parents are now calling for the Bureau to inspect shoe imports and implement quality standards to protect them from what they consider to be downright exploitation.
Jenica Carter is a working mother of five. She has no choice but to make the low-end shoe purchases. In September, she bought five pairs of shoes for her children, ranging in age from four to thirteen. She paid $1,500 each for two girls’ shoes, $2,300 for one pair and $2,700 each for two pairs of boys’ shoes. By mid-October four of the five pairs of shoes had been taken to the cobblers for stitching and half-soling; all told the repairs cost her $4,000. By the end of October the material on one of the repaired pairs begun to peel. To disguise the disrepair she has taken to applying polish.
Carter has already resigned herself to having to buy her children new shoes when the Easter term begins in January. Something will have to give; probably snacks. She reflects on the fact that when her 13-year-old son was younger she could press his outgrown shoes into service as hand-me-downs to his brother; not these days.
Stephanie has two children under the age of 12. She has experienced the same problem. Rather than endure it she made the sacrifice of replacing the ruined shoes with more expensive ones. Again, something had to give.
Michael Carrington is the Proprietor of Foreman’s Electrical Shoe Repair Shop. Foreman’s is one of the more reputable shoe manufacturing and repair establishments in the city and Carrington is one of the country’s best-known shoemakers. He says that much of the problem reposes in the current use of cheaper synthetic fabric in the manufacture of shoes. The soles of many of the shoes now available on the local market are no longer made of natural leather, rubber or crepe. The manufacturing industry is now pressing various oil-based synthetics into service. They can cope with neither hot weather nor rainy conditions. Inferior pastes are used to tie the sole to the upper portion of the shoe. It can neither withstand the pressure of feet inside the shoes nor the wet weather. He says too, that fewer manufacturers adhere to the practice of turning in at least half an inch of material to connect the upper and lower parts of the shoe. These days it’s less than a quarter of an inch. His repairs must often include adding an additional strip of leather to ensure that the two halves of the shoe are attached more securely.
All this, of course, has meant a windfall for the small cobbler, some of whom concede that the vast majority of their income comes from effecting frequent repairs to school shoes. One downtown cobbler told this newspaper that “on average” he has to effect repairs of one sort of another to at least half a dozen pairs of school shoes every day. Larger contracts come from companies who purchase footwear for employees then take several pairs of them to the cobbler to be stitched. “We understand the parents’ problem. Sometimes we fix the shoe and take whatever they have,” the cobbler said.
Carrington says that while there is little that the parents can do about the quality of shoes available on the market, effecting prior re-enforcement to new pairs is perhaps the best option. He says that apart from the fact that this course of action adds “some additional life” to the shoes, repairs can be costlier once the shoes are near-ruined before they are attended to.
There is another problem that affects the life of the inexpensive school shoes. It has to do, Carrington says, with the fact that some shoes imported into Guyana are stored for long periods inside windowless shipping containers in Panama, the turnaround point for the giant cargo freighters ferrying cargo from Asia to the Western Hemisphere. They bring with them, sometimes, cheap, sub-standard goods and misery for ordinary Guyanese parents.
There are, of course, options to cheap school shoes. There are brand names like Converse, Nike, Air Max, Adidas and Puma. Those names, however, come at a higher cost, sometimes as much as $35,000 a pair. Then there are the imitation specialists in Asia who offer cheaper versions of the big brand names. Some of the parents get taken in by the imitations and suffer an even costlier fate.
