Tender Sky Shoehorn

In which I re­veal a lit­tle life-hack that can get you out your front door no­tice­ably quick­er. First, a pic­ture.

That’s a re­al­ly long shoe­horn. You can use it stand­ing up, just a slight stoop even for 5'11" me. This one comes from Daiso, a Ja­panese 100円 (think $1) store, which has em­barked on world dom­i­na­tion.

Why you should do this · So you don’t have to tie your shoes. Slip ’em off when you come home then use the shoe­horn to slip ’em back on when leav­ing.

Now, we all know that your Mom told you nev­er to do this, be­cause it would ru­in your shoes; they’d get all crushed at the back. But since she didn’t have a long shoe­horn in the front hal­l, we can for­give her slight wrong­ness in this case.

I have ev­i­dence: In 2007 or so, I fell in love with a pair of hik­ing shoes from Zam­ber­lan, and since then I’ve worn Zam­ber­lan ev­ery day I’m not wear­ing san­dals (less than half the year in Canada) or shiny-blacks (on­ly when I give a speech or meet a fu­ture Prime Min­is­ter). And as I write this, I’m wait­ing for de­liv­ery of a new pair. Which will be the third pair I’ve owned. Since 2007. Which is to say, slip­ping your shoes on and off doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly ru­in them, if you do it right.

Con­sid­er the ag­gre­gate time I’ve saved over those years, not ty­ing shoes once or twice a day!

On Daiso · In ful­l, the text on that shoe­horn: Ten­der Sky/Pas­sion to build new lives. I won­dered about that; sus­pect­ed Brand Mar­ket­ing. But nope, Net search­ing sug­gests it’s just a thing Daiso puts on mer­chan­dis­e; the usu­al cheerfully-deranged Ja­panese English-flinging.

I rec­om­mend ev­ery­one check out a big Daiso at least on­ce; they up­date reg­u­lar­ly and man­age to be in­ter­est­ing. Hav­ing done that, I can no longer take the cheap­/ex­u­ber­ant on­slaugh­t, and wait else­where in the mall while loved ones do the Daiso.

Any­how, stop ty­ing your shoes!

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