Yesterday, while in the bedding department at Walmart, shopping for a new bedspread for my sweet little 93-year-old grandmother, I heard a man's voice behind me: "Excuse me, but where did you get your shoes?"
I turned around to see a clean-cut, well-dressed man who was in his late 20s or early 30s, clean-shaven, smiling pleasantly. He complimented me on how well my shoes matched the rest of my outfit. At first, I thought he was flirting with me,... until he kept going on and on about the shoes and how well they matched what I was wearing.
Getting more and more uncomfortable, I thanked him and started to walk away... something seemed a little "off" to me about this conversation. Men -- normal ones, anyway -- don't give a rat's ass about women's shoes. And while I could entertain the notion that a man might compliment a woman's shoes as a way of hitting on her, it quickly became clear to me that the man was more excited about the shoes themselves.
As I kept trying to edge my way down the aisle in the opposite direction, he kept talking. Said he worked at 9 West and wondered where I got the shoes. Said how nice I looked. Then he asked, "Is that a 2 or 3 inch heel", and as I picked up my foot to look (it was 1 inch) he actually bent down and touched the shoe... and then my foot!
EEEEWWWWWWWWWW! Foot fetish alert!
Naturally I got the hell out of there. I didn't see him again in the store but the more I thought about it, I realized he really probably was some kind of fetishist who was hanging around in the Walmart departments where women were most likely to be shopping, probably looking for women with open-toe shoes. He was probably telling the truth about working at 9 West because if you had a foot fetish, wouldn't you want to work as a shoe salesman?
Twenty years ago when I worked in a Macy's in Cosmetics, there was a foot fetish guy cruising the mall and the cops and security guards were always on the lookout for him. All the Macy's sales staff was told to look out for him, too. I saw him twice. The first time was when he was wandering around the Juniors department and when he spotted a woman with interesting feet, all of a sudden he'd duck down under the clothing rack she was standing next to, and would actually stick a dollar bill in her shoe! (You'd always know when he'd struck paydirt by the screams.) And the other time I saw him, I was in the mall sitting in the carpeted "pit" seating area under the escalator, taking my lunch break. I had taken off my shoes and was reading a magazine when all of a sudden the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I looked around... and there he was sitting on the other side of the big sunken "pit", watching my feet! Suffice to say I didn't waste any time putting my shoes back on and leaving. (It wasn't worth the chance to make a buck.) Creep.
So when I met this loser in Walmart yesterday, it was not my first encounter with this kind of pervy behavior. The thing that stuck with me all day afterward was how I was ready to brush off my intuitions. What I probably should have done was tail him around the store and found a manager. That just wasn't normal behavior... and he must have known I was on to him in the end because he was no where to be found in the area. He had no shopping cart or merchandise with him when he was talking to me, so we know he wasn't in the middle of buying a new set of pillowcases for himself, either, therefore what else was he doing hanging around in the bedding department if not in hopes of finding some women with cute shoes showing lots of "foot"?
It's pretty sad when the pervs are cruising the local Walmart, even when they're well dressed and look "normal". Then again... maybe they can blend in better there than say, Nordstrom's or Neiman Marcus.
