From the New Yorker: Happy Feet.
At its most rarefied, shoe shopping still takes place in hushed, pastel-carpeted salons, with salesmen (they are usually men-one doesn’t like to think too closely about why) staggering under stacks of boxes and kneeling down to insure the perfect fit before whisking away the charge plates of their waiting Cinderellas. Some people still consider pawing through the sale racks at Bloomingdale’s or the fluorescent-lit aisles of the Designer Shoe Warehouse an enjoyable contact sport. But Zappos and its imitators-shoes.com, heels.com, and the Gap’s inexplicably named piperlime.com-are shifting this public transaction into the comfort and privacy of customers’ living rooms. There, thanks to Zappos’s three-hundred-and-sixty-five-day return policy, we can all be Imelda Marcos, sifting through ceiling-high piles of boxes, and waiting in sweatpanted indolence for the UPS man to pick up our rejects.
Unlike most Web sites, including Amazon’s, which seem to be operated by spectral forces rather than by human beings, Zappos prominently displays a toll-free customer-service phone number. There are no limits on call times, and the resulting sessions occasionally resemble protracted talk therapy. On July 5th, a twenty-two-year-old C.L.T. member named Britnee Brown, who has been with the company for a little more than a year, took a call that was a record five hours, twenty-five minutes, and thirty-one seconds long, from a woman on the East Coast interested in Masai Barefoot Technology shoes, which purport to mimic supposedly salubrious barefoot-on-the-beach walking with curved rubber platforms. “We started talking about her sister,” Brown said. The call that set the previous record lasted more than four hours, with a woman afflicted by peripheral neuropathy who had trouble feeling her feet. “She told me childhood stories, things like that,” Jennifer S., the operator who handled that one, said in a video posted on YouTube. Zappos has advertised sparingly thus far, preferring word of mouth, and (unlike most companies) encourages employees to let it all hang out on Twitter and Facebook.
