Bucky

But wait, there's more... shoes.

Back in the spring, when I bought a pair of light tan suede bucks from Lands' End, I talked about some other buck-style shoes I'd seen at Nordstrom. For fall, they have returned, but with the traditional brick-red rubber soles instead of the goofy white ones, and in seasonally appropriate colors. They are sold under the store's 1901 house brand.

I was very excited to find that these shoes were being offered in gray, because I've been looking for a pair of gray bucks with red soles for some time. I hadn't been in Nordstrom in a while, so I discovered the shoes while looking at their site. They are offering free shipping with any shoe purchase, and the bucks are available in regular, narrow, and wide widths, so I ordered up a pair of the gray ones. (They are also available in the traditional dark khaki "dirty buck" color, dark brown, navy, loden, a very odd mustardy gold, and rust.)

For $100, these shoes are a very good value: they have excellent cushioning in the footbeds, are fully leather lined (this isn't that common at the $100 price point), and are made in Brazil, which isn't Italy or the US, but it isn't China either. There was only one problem: the toes were worn down or something. The nap of the suede was gone, and they looked black in front. The Mrs. said she thought they looked like it had been done on purpose. I kind of thought she was right, but I hoped she wasn't. I went back and looked at the shoes online; it wasn't obvious from the pictures that there was anything going on with the toes, or I would not have ordered them.

Over the weekend I took them back to the store (anything you buy online from Nordstrom can be returned to a store, saving the cost of sending it back to them if there's one near you). Sure enough, a salesperson in the shoe department explained to me that the "burnished" (her word) appearance of the toes was so "they look like you've had them for a long time." I decided not to bother trying to explain to her why this was a terrible idea.

I was going to just return the shoes, but she pointed out to me that the dirty buck ones did not have the distressed toes (perhaps in a gesture of appeasement to fussy old guys like me?), so I exchanged the gray ones for those. I figured, they are really comfortable shoes, which aren't always that easy for me to find these days, and the dark khaki is probably easier to coordinate with than the gray ones would have been. But I still hope to find gray ones some time.