I would be here 10 hours a day and spent another four hours repairing the machines. You have to replace them, you know, so you can be more efficient.
We're pretty busy up until the first week in December. It winds down after that because people have other things in their mind, but that's fine with me since I like taking the week off between Christmas and New Year's.
It is a good organization. People have been pressuring me to become more involved, but I have no time to prepare for the competition.
People need to go to a professional shoe store, and they don't like to hear that because they know it will be expensive. But these are your feet, and having the proper shoes can save you from a lot of toe and back problems in the future.
Those pointy shoes for women with the high heels, those are the worst things out there. Your toes were never meant to have that kind of pressure on them.
There's somebody I'm friendly with in the shoe repair business in New York, and he's at retirement age. He told me he only has two pairs of shoes to work on a day, but he's never upgraded or modernized his equipment.
These shoes are great. They don't look every fashionable, but they feel good.
The shoes don't make themselves. You have to be creative to make sure the shoe will fit properly afterwards.
Some people think a shoe has to be skin tight to fit, which is not the case. Some people want me to stretch their shoe up another shoe size, but that's something I can't do.
This business isn't as dead as everyone thinks it is. I go to seminars dealing with new machinery and how to fix new shoes that are coming out on the market.
They're quick fixes. People buy cheap throwaway shoes that have no support, and down the line in the future they will be paying for it dearly.
It's probably a size 55. This is a project my grandfather and I did in the 70s one snowy winter when we were bored.
I started in my grandfather's shop in New Haven years ago. I was kind of a troublemaker, so as punishment my mom would make me help him. I was 12 or 13 years old at the time, and I took a liking to it. So I guess you can say I've been paying for my sins for 43 years!
I'm on the hunt now for a bigger facility because half of my shop is in my garage. I would like to have a nice retail area that would sell comfortable shoes.
