Saw some conversation on shoes and shorts in a public place. I’ve asked a number of agencies about Homeland policy of requiring people to take their shoes off. Not so much a problem in winter, but summer is a problem. We have one of everything walking around in bare feet at O’Hare and my 5 year old has to walk through same area. Try and do this in any other public place in Chicago.
Ft. Lauderdale did have booties. Why are not all such stations required to have same?
Ask HS they tell you their job is security. I tell them job is attention to detail, the by product being security, and making sure the public has sanitary conditions is attention to detail.
Might not seem to be much of a concern to some, until you look at some of the feet crossing same threshold your kids do.
Wacky, or a valid concern?
NMCD
If it’s a concern of yours, wear socks and shoes instead of flipflops to the airport.
It’s no more unsanitary to go barefoot in an airport than it is to go barefoot in a shared shower (see: every college dorm in America).
Wacky, definitely wacky.
Is there any evidence that people walking in socks are making the floor less hygienic than people walking in shoes? I would not have thought it made any difference.
I’m no fan of taking off my shoes in airports, but I don’t think there is much chance of catching anything from the floor. For one, I agree with **Giles **that socked feet do not strike me as notably less hygenic than shod feet. For another, your feet seem like a terrible vector for disease - hands are much better since we touch our mouths and noses all the time. I doubt your 5 year old is at any danger of anything from the floor that he is not already being exposed to in the air or on surfaces.
Think about it this way - when you take your kid to the airport, do you let him touch the x-ray conveyer belt, the counter at the magazine stand, the door handle in the bathroom, the chairs in the boarding lounges? Because if you do he’s getting exposed to a hell of a lot more germys there than I can imagine being on any floor.
Just take him home after the flight and give him a good bath. A little workout will do his immune system good!
What—the OP has something to do with airports??
Is there someplace else where homeland security requires removal of shoes?
OP was poorly worded, I agree. But the context was not difficult to infer.
Well, he did mention O’Hare. The OP also has a faint ring of English-as-a-second-language to it, so I cut him some slack on the clarity.
Wacky. Don’t let the kid lick his or anyone else’s feet, or the floor. Which, incidentally, is a good policy in any situation.
This is even sillier than women who hover over the toilet seat for fear of catching some sort of ass cooties from a few flakes of someone else’s butt skin.
It’s funny how times, change. When I was a kid, we’d always go barefoot. When school ended, from that time, till school started in the fall, we never put on shoes except to go to church. Of course back then you could go into most stores without shoes.
I still go around barefoot most of the time. My brother would walk barefoot in the snow. But he’d eat an apple, core, seeds and all, so nothing bugged him 
I have come across it in European airports.
The question I asked, to clarify, was “Is there anyplace that homeland security requires removal of shoes, other than an airport?”
OP - Do you let your 5 year old go barefoot in your yard, on the sidewalk, at the beach or pool?
My guess is that a person’s feet get much dirtier at those locations, than at an airport, where the floor gets washed with some regularity and there are no squirrels or birds shitting on the ground.