Shoe Experiment

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A very expensive, designer shoe store opened up in Los Angeles recently. They did it on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, which is the part of the LA which is often shown in movies. The shoes sold for $500 - $1000 a pair or higher. A large number of very sophisticated people and "social media influencers" purchased the shoes. The praised the shoes for their quality and styling. Then, they buyers were all told that all the shoes had actually come from PayLess, a discount shoe store, and they were worth less than $50 a pair. The fake store was named Palessi, a play on the word Payless. The buyers were refunded their purchase price and were allowed to keep the shoes. They were also let in on the joke and all of them were very surprised that they had been so easily fooled into thinking they were buying expensive designer shoes. PayLess said it was a social experiment to see if people really would pay an excessively high price for a pair of discount shoes. They did. One of our daughters used to be a shoe buyer for a very high class department store. She handled shoes like Channel, Prada, Jimmy Choo, Christian Louboutin, Farragamo, Gucci, Manolo Blahnik and others. I can't wait to ask her what she thinks about this experiment!