Skateboarding Articles
Foot Locker Buys CCS Skateboard Mailorder
Holy crap! Can you trust anyone these days? Hell no!
We all know Foot Locker as that jock-friendly shoe store that occupies space in virtually every mall. Personally, I don't want to buy shoes from some kid dressed up in a referee's uniform any more than I want to be served food by a kid in a pirate costume. Although I prefer pirates to jocks any day.
Shoe stores seem very generic to me and who ever has the best price for the shoe I want gets my business. I've never set foot in a Foot Locker store as those mall stores irritate the hell outta me and are usually very over-priced. Finding deals on the internet is pretty easy and convenient, right? But who are you really dealing with?
My biased history of who Foot Locker used to be
Remember Woolworth's department stores?
They were the predecessor to stores like Walmart and Target where customers roamed the isles and helped themselves to whatever they needed. Sales people only worked the registers as shoppers didn't need help, they just needed the shelves to be stocked.
From Wikipedia:
The F. W. Woolworth Company (often referred to as Woolworth's) was a retail company that was one of the original American five-and-dime stores. The first Woolworth's store was founded, with a loan of $300, in 1878 by Frank Winfield Woolworth. Despite growing to be one of the largest retail chains in the world, increased competition led to its decline beginning in the 1980s. In 1997, F. W. Woolworth Company converted itself into a sporting goods retailer, closing its remaining retail stores operating under the "Woolworth's" brand name and renaming itself Venator Group. By 2001, the company focused exclusively on the sporting goods market, changing its name to the present Foot Locker.
I recall being somewhat saddened by the closing of Woolworth's. I'd shopped there for a long time even though most of the stores were dirty and poorly run. Finding out that they had evolved into a mall-based shoe store actually pissed me off and I vowed never to buy shoes from a pimply-faced referee-shirt-wearing douche. And I stuck to it! Or so I thought.
Support Local Skate Shops
I fully believe in supporting local skate shops and only venture online when I can't source product from my local shop. Often I buy DVDs from CCS as local shops usually can't carry a full array of skate videos. So, now I discover the online shop I use (CCS) has been bought out by the guys I vowed never to buy shoes from, Foot Locker! Damn!
I'd sooner buy a 12-pack of tube socks from Woolworth's than a single pair from Foot Locker!
An article in Transworld Biz stated that Foot Locker is going to ramp up (no pun intended) on skate shoes. They seem to have just realized that barefoot skating went out a long time ago and apparently they figure on becoming a player in skate shoe sales. Good luck with that - at the mall. Real skaters will avoid that trap like the plague.
Independent skateboard shops don't need another conglomerate trying to cash-in on the skate market. I'm pretty sure most of those guys in referee shirts don't know squat about skateboarding. They can probably tell me a thing or two about basketball shoes or soccer cleats, but skating is best left to those who participate. Skate shop owners and workers are the ones who can sell a skate shoe.
CCS goes corprporate
So, CCS joins the ranks of corporate-run businesses that feel as though a board of directors in suits (pretending to be athletes) can broach skateboard culture and appeal to skaters. Yeah, skaters don't have respect for too many folks outside their own click, let alone a mall store trying to creep into their territory.
And What about the CCS skate team? They claim to have a roster of pros like: Corey Duffel, Cairo Foster, Arto Saari, Tosh Townend and Ryan Sheckler to name a few. When are these guys going to add Foot Locker to their resumes? Just like Nike came in and snagged a crew of amazing skaters, I have no issues with any of the pros who ride for CCS. If they can make a good living from it, that's cool. I just wonder what the pros think of suddenly becoming part of a mall shoe store.
Best of luck to everyone and avoid the mall unless you're stalking chicks or their MILFy moms.
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