If we would have had a time machine, we’d go back a hundred and fifty years back and we’d see a whole different world.

A show polished hair granny, dragging her stick on her way home from the post office gets angry at a pile of mud she just stepped in. She tried to wipe her shoe slowly, on the asphalt, and she looks like she has weak knees. The truth…

`Dear, I bought them over 20 years ago. My husband was still with me back then – he died four years ago – I used to walk with these shoes 5 buss stations everyday to get to his hospital room and bring him a hot bagel`

The granny looks too fond to that pair of black leather shoes, why would someone care so much about such perishable things. `No, they weren’t a present from my late husband. I just didn’t have a pair of new shoes until I was 30 years old. I lived in a small village, grew up eating what was growing in our garden. We were so poor that me and my four sisters had no shoes, and in the winter, when we went outside, we would take our mothers shoes, by turn, carefully step like they were made of glass.`

Life as we know it would be different without a pair of kickers

`Becoming a woman, with a husband and my own roof over my head brought me my first pair of shoes. All of them already worn by some Germans who made donations to all the poor countries in Europe. They were ugly as hell, too colorful, but I remember stepping outside with them and feeling nothing. Soaking my feet in a puddle and not feeling the cold mud slipping between my toes.`

That was over 60 years ago, said the old woman.

Today. European people rarely know the feeling. The world of NOW rarely knows the feeling. There are still a great deal of  places in the world, the world of the oppressed, who can still be a reminder of those times in a harder to swallow truth: those situations over a minimum of three pairs of new shoes by person, yearly, in the EU and USA.

The `Global Footwear Market` is valued at more than 250 billion $ and will surpass the 300 billion step by 2022. The interesting fact is that the shoe black market, you know, the fake Nike and Adidas, all of the red bottom, blue suede shoes make the same incomes as tax-paying store bought footwear.

Designers accept the challenge

The first thing the Footwear Industry made when the marked was overloaded with china-made-low-quality-cheap-but-good shoes was to worry about the profits. And to cover the gap, they skyrocketed the prices on designer products, on sport brands and quadrupled the price on fabric. An average pair of Nike will now cost $ 200 in Europe. And people buy. Because they need shoes. And every year, all over the world, hundreds of thousand businessman’s get into shoe-show business.

Al Bundy got us fooled

The `Married with children` prime character had a tough and amusing life as a shoe salesman.

Well, the 2020 market on footwear will be groundbreaking in terms of numbers. Everyone in the fashion industry is focused on shoes and many stylists are waiting to get on the public stage and teach everyone what shoes goes with what, when to wear and all that. And not only in fashion. Gear brands for sports are on the top of bursting – buy the beast footwear gear for riding a bike, even if you only go out on two wheels once a month.

`That will be $250, thank you very much!`

• The United States has the largest footwear market in the world, amounting to approximately 79.86 billion U.S. dollars in revenue in 2017.

Yeezys, top-selling sneakers in the US in 2018 – $550 a pair