When I was young it was quite common to have the heels on my dress shoes replaced, also the soles. (required daily for school)
I don’t wear dress shoes very often, maybe once a year for weddings/funerals or meeting the big bosses. I don’t even know where a cobbler is in my area. I’d probably just buy new shoes. Though the ones I own now are probably 30 years old.
I also had a shoe shine kit. Now I just rub a sock on them to get the dust off.
I regularly got my pumps reheeled, not ten years ago. I don’t wear those kinds of shoes enough to wear them out in my lifetime, these days. Used to wear them for church and for singing gigs.
I know there’s more than one cobbler in the nearest town, though. We live in a tiny village, a cobbler would die of starvation here.
Up in our downtown area, there’s a shoe repair store - they’re friendly, they’re good at what they do, and their dog is a nifty window display.
Now’s the time to bring back the term Cordwainer.
Wasn’t @Broomstick a cobbler? Or am I misrembering?
^ I believe you’re right on the mark. We had a brief conversation about shoe repair, once.
I have one because I wear some halfway-decent loafers to work sometimes (I work IT in a professional environment and try not to look like a total schlub) and I have a small shoeshine kit.
I’ve never actually used it though. By the time my shoes get to the point where they might need polishing I just replace them. (I try to buy shoes that look decent but aren’t actually that expensive.)
I think my intentions were good but ultimately that was a waste of money.
I own some fairly expensive shoes, as I take EEE width, which is very hard to find in less expensive shoes. On the plus side, I have been able to take advantage of Vimes’s boots theory of socio-economic unfairness. So I have a cobbler. I have one pair of shoes that has been re-soled and refurbished 3 times. I clean, oil, and polish the shoes regularly, as a matter of maintenance more than appearance.
My brother in law did shoe repair. When he retired he sent me to a colleague who also does good work. I watch the heel pads on my boots pretty close so the repairs don’t dig clear down to the leather of the heels.
The new guy does not do them for free like Gary did though…
About once a year I take my Birkenstocks to a local cobbler to have them re-soled. Over the summer soles tend to wear down in the heel, and if it wears all the way through it starts to damage the cork.
I had to look it up - the nearest shoe repair shop to me is over 20 miles away. Not that it matters - I wear Skechers - you don’t replace heels and soles on them. I don’t have any hard soled shoes. So, no, I don’t have a cobbler.
I’ll have to contact @burpo_the_wonder_mutt for a recommendation…the closest one around here has awful reviews. I spent five years shopping for this last pair of dress shoes, and still regard them as a temporary solution.
There are any number of shoe repair places around here. And all over NYC.
If you called any of them a “cobbler,” they probably wouldn’t know what you were talking about.
Do you use them?
Yes. I can usually get five resole/reheels out of a decent pair of shoes before the uppers are too far gone.
Yes, there is one in a nearby medium-sized mall. Fortunately he’s also younger than I am, so chances are he will outlast me (and I won’t have to be without a cobbler, because I don’t expect anyone to take over when he’s gone).
I just saw what I did there.
Oh
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I obtained a strange little foam rubber contraption that has something embedded in it which shines shoes without needing to add shoe polish. It has lasted me for decades and still works fine.
I don’t resole dress shoes but I resole hiking boots as need be.
Just about 1 km away from my apartment is a wide sidewalk corner with a few folks practicing some trades: mending clothes, locksmithing, and of course cobbling. I’ve had work done by all of them.
I had a couple of them in Bangkok. During my early days there, it was next to impossible to find shoes my size in a store. My feet are much larger than the average Thai’s. But the situation gradually improved to the point where I could find my size in several stores.
Where I live, they advertise as “shoe and leather repair.” I used one years ago, when I had an expensive pair of sandals that had a few loose stitches (they charged their minimum fee, $5, and I was able to wear them for a couple more summers) and my brother has used one because he wears size 14 and his shoes cost a small fortune, so it’s worth it to have them repaired.