Diving for Boxes

Online shoe shopping is possibly one of the greatest benefits of the rise of e-commerce over the past 15 years or so. (I do miss the full-service, multi-brand shoe stores of my youth, but that's a post for another time.) Sites like Zappos and Endless have far more variety than you could ever hope to find in a single store anywhere, and you typically receive your shoes within a day or two of ordering them.

(If you have VIP status at Zappos, you get permanent free overnight shipping. (They used to offer this to everyone all the time, but cut back a few years ago.) They offer VIP signup days now and then, or you can go to vip.zappos.com and get on the "waiting list." However, knowing what sort of company they are and the emphasis they place on service, I think that if you just called their customer-service number and asked, they would give you VIP status. YMMV.)

The flip side of this convenience is that you don't always know what size you should order, especially if it's a brand you are not familiar with or one that isn't readily available in local stores. With many brands of shoes I'm kind of between sizes, so the right size might depend on whether or not I plan on wearing the shoes with socks, or whether or not the shoes are available in wide widths. I frequently have to order two pairs of the same style to find the right size (which is where shopping in a store can be easier).

It's not really a big deal since most shoe sites offer free returns for this very reason—just pack 'em back up and drop off the box at the nearest UPS Store. But what happens when you order two pairs of shoes and then need to return one of them? It's not always practical to send that pair back in the larger box that arrived containing two pairs. Sometimes it can be extremely awkward. In the past couple of weeks I've had to deal with this situation twice.

Now, I tend to hold onto the boxes I receive stuff in. I have the space (in the basement), I sometimes need boxes for those times when I sell things on eBay or Style Forum, and I have some pack-rat tendencies to begin with, so I grabbed a tape measure and headed down to the basement. One box was easy, but the other was a problem. Plus, since the shoes were from separate orders from two different online stores, they could not go in the same box.

I had ordered some red canvas "tennis shoes" from SeaVees, a newish revival of an old brand that's been producing some really nice retro-looking styles in the past couple of years. Since I ordered two different sizes, and the shoe boxes SeaVees uses are somewhat larger than normal, the box Zappos shipped them in was fairly gigantic—it could easily hold five or six "normal" shoe boxes. When the UPS guy appeared at my cubicle the other day holding the box, I though he had me mixed up with someone else in the office.

I couldn't realistically send back the other pair in the huge box, but I also couldn't find a box in my basement stash that would fit the oversize box. The shoes were still at the office, and we do sometimes have empty boxes around there, so I went back to work the next day hoping I could find something suitable. Eventually, in the copier room, I found a box that had contained copies of one of our publications. It was a couple of inches longer and wider than the shoe box, and tall enough. I also found a large quantity of bubble wrap that I used to fill the extra space.

So now it seems I may need to start hoarding boxes at work, too.