It is amazing to me how the retail industry is able to convince people that one brand is superior to another. I am a person that loves to shop. I will always go along with friends to shop for home furnishings, apparel, gifts or anything else that is available. I even enjoy grocery shopping. Because I enjoy shopping so much I do a great deal of comparison shopping. I will spend one day comparing quality and value and will go back the next day and actually make my purchase. People that know me and my love of shopping are surprised that I am not loyal to any certain brand names. I have friends that have to have certain designer labels or specific shoe brands, but I do not pay any attention to the labels on the clothing I purchase and I doubt that I could name more than two shoe brands.

One of my friends knows that I love to buy shoes. I own dozens of pairs. She called very excited because she read in the paper that there was going to be a huge inventory sale in the warehouse district that was featuring several elite shoe brands. As she was rattling off the different shoe brands I did not even know what types of shoes she was talking about. I recognize the names of athletic shoes because of the amount of advertising they do, but the other shoe brands were foreign to me. When I told her this she said that was exactly the point. These were foreign designer shoes that are very expensive and they were being featured at the sale.

I told her that I am always interested in shopping so we made arrangements for me to pick her up the day of the sale. The sale hours were from eight o’clock in the morning until eight o’clock at night. I thought we should meet in the mid morning so that we could go out for lunch after. My friend agreed that we should go out for lunch when we were done shopping; however she wanted to be at the warehouse when the doors opened. She felt that we would need three to four hours to look at and try on the various shoe brands that she was most interested in. Even though I love shoes I could not imagine trying them on for four hours, but I agreed to pick her up so that we could arrive at the warehouse when the doors open. I was thinking that we would be the first people there. When we pulled into the parking lot I had to drive around for five minutes to find a parking spot. There were hundreds of women waiting to get into the warehouse. When the doors opened people scattered and were grabbing shoes. We finally left the sale after noon. We both had several pairs of various shoe brands. The discounts were remarkable and the shoes were very high quality.