Salmon Shoes

I used to work at a retail outlet for a major, national chain store. Because we were an "outlet store", generally we catered to bargain hunters, low income people, large families, recent immigrants, and misers. A lot of the shoppers were great people, but sometimes the clientele was less than desireable. Watching my meticulously cleaned shoe department be tossed on the floor like garbage, hour after hour was a little disheartening, to say the least.

As an outlet store, we tended to receive the hand-me-downs from the "normal" stores, stuff that just plain didn't sell anywhere else. One time, we were shipped hundreds of ugly, salmon coloured strappy shoes. In a fit of desperation, at the prospect of unboxing and pricing hundreds of these poky, tangled eyesores, my manager marked them down to 99 cents, piled them on a 4 foot by 4 foot table, and let the sharks have'em. Every morning and periodically through the day, I had to wade through the waters to the table, and attempt to restock and clean it. Soon, it became the bane of my existence, and everytime I saw a customer headed for it, I would cringe and look away.

Well, one day, I was walking by the table and I saw a scruffy looking man poking about the evil table. Now, at an outlet store, the policy is generally self serve, but I stopped and asked if I could help him. He seemed a little in over his head, as he asked me for a size in the salmon beauties for his girlfriend. Knowing that we had literally hundreds sitting in the back, probably mating and multiplying, I ran to the stockroom and brought him one back.

Upon my return, I had my breath taken away, when I looked down and realized that the man had cleaned up the table for me in my absence. No customer had ever done anything like that before. And he probably didn't realize it, but he almost made me cry, for the table had me at my wit's end.

In a job that often made me question the morals of the human race, that made me dislike people more than anything else in the world had before, this man reminded me of something. That people are not all bad, and that a kind act no matter how small, can stick with someone for the rest of their lives. This happened a good two or three years ago, and while the man probably forgot about his act shortly thereafter, I have clung to the memory ever since.