116. Cobblers

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There are a lot of ways to learn about who a person is. You can ask them what books they read, listen to how they talk about other people, or watch the way they treat waiters at a restaurant.

But all Jim McFarland needs to do is take a glance at their shoes. If you always wear the left one out first, well, you must drive your car a lot.
That's your pivot foot.

That's the first one in and out of the car.

And so you spend on that foot. Looking at somebody's shoes tells you a lot about them.
You can tell if they keep a tidy house or not.

If their shoe comes in and it is beat up bad, I'm thinking to myself, I don't want to go to their house.

For McFarland, this knowledge comes from more than 40 years on the job as a professional cobbler. He's the owner of McFarland's Shoe Repair in Lakeland, Florida.

We do a lot of Russell moccasin boots, which is a really nice high-end hunting boot. We do a lot of Alan Edmonds, Alden's, Edward Green,

vintage floorsheim. I did one for a Santa Claus.
That was a lot of fun. We did a red sole with green stitching and green and red shoelaces.

In the modern world, it's often a surprise to encounter a cobbler shop. These days, most shoes aren't built to last or to be repaired.
When you wear a pair out, you throw it away and buy a new one.

But today's cobblers benefit from a supply and demand paradox. The industry is slowly dying out.
But for those who remain, business is booming. Did you ever see the movie 300?

Remember all those thousands of people that were against them? That's what it feels like being a shoe cobbler these days.

The number of shoes coming at us is overwhelming. I've never seen a bigger demand in my life.
For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is the Economics of Everyday Things. I'm Zachary Crockett.

Today, Cobblers.

Like many of today's cobblers, Jim McFarland inherited the family business.

He's a fourth-generation shoe repairman, following in the footsteps of his great-great-uncle, his grandfather, and his father.

My grandfather used to take my dad to the shop, and of course he had to wait on customers, and you can't leave a toddler back there crawling around with shoes and machines.

So he would take a shoe cobbler nail and hammer his diaper to the floor so he couldn't go anywhere. McFarland has memories of his own growing up in his father's shop in Lakeland, Florida.

He tied a piece of leather to my crib, and I still have this piece of leather where I actually teethed on it and have all my teeth marks in it.

By the time I was about 15 years old, I kind of knew how to do most everything. After you've seen something done enough, you just kind of know how to do it.

It was kind of like speaking your native language. I didn't want to be in the business.
Growing up, they struggled to pay the bills, and I didn't want to live like that.

When he passed away, I felt him there, and I just felt like if I was going to close the shop, I was going to lose part of him.

I told my wife, if I'm going to have to be a cobbler, I want to try to take it to the highest level I can if there is such a thing for a cobbler. McFarland took over the business in 1986.

Today, he still runs the place. From the outside, McFarland Shoe Repair is pretty easy to miss.
It's in a strip mall, sandwiched between a pawn shop and an insurance agency.

There's a small rusty drop box for shoes on the front door and an orthopedic sign in the window. But inside, in the back room, you'll find the hidden universe of a craftsman.

Lots of rubber soles for boots, lots of little parts for buckles and purses and

nail sizes. Oh man, just hundreds of little nail sizes and threads.
I haven't changed that much over the last 30 years. The stitching machines are pretty much the same.
The hand tools are the same.

I have some tools back there that are over 100 years old. I can't even put a price on how much it would cost if you wanted to start a shop and fully inventory it with everything you'd need.

It'd be in the tens of thousands. Do you know how to fix the old machines yourself? I can do probably about 80% of it.

Now, if there's something I can't do, there's one guy that's retired here in Florida that owned Brooklyn shoe machinery, and he's still around.

And And then I have a good friend up in Goshen, New York. All he's done his whole life is repair machines.
And there's not too many left. There's only a handful left in the whole country.

Going to the cobbler used to be a lot more common than it is today. People would buy one pair of shoes and wear them for 20 or 30 years.

The soles would wear out, and someone like McFarlane's grandfather would replace them. But for the past few decades, the trade has been in slow decline.

During the Great Depression in the United States, we had about 120,000 shoe repair shops. By 1990, we had about 15,000 shops.
In around 2000, we had 7,500.

And today, there's maybe 3,200 or so.

There are a few reasons for that decline. For one, fewer people are taking on the work.

Nobody has really picked up the hammer and learned the trade. Back in the older days, you had bigger families.

Lots of Italian families, Greek families, immigrant families that grew up in the business. They had lots of kids, you know, six to ten kids or so.

So you had families running the business, kids taking over. And then as time went on, they didn't have as big of families.
Kids went off to college to do other things. And time itself has kind of...

fizzled it down to low numbers. The rise of fast fashion has also chipped away at the business.
Many of today's shoes are built for looks rather than longevity.

They're made out of less durable synthetic materials and are meant to be replaced rather than repaired.

In many cases, it's cheaper to buy a new pair of shoes than go to the cobbler and have an old one restored. But there are still plenty of customers who choose to invest in nice shoes.

When you're spending $500 to $1,000

or more

and you get them recrafted for 25-30% of what you paid for them, that's worth it. Good shoes are going to breathe.
They're going to break in quicker.

They're going to be more comfortable, more flexible. They're recraftable.
They just get better and better over time.

I mean, I had a pair in last week that were probably 30 years old. The guy was putting complete new bottoms on them.
And the uppers felt so good. They were so soft like leather gloves.

It don't get this good except by time.

As the number of cobbler shops declines, the remaining businesses, like McFarlane's shoe repair, are absorbing more work. We're seeing bigger numbers than we've ever seen.

If you only had 10 million Americans buying quality shoes, that's a lot of shoes for 3,200 shops left in the country. How many pairs of shoes would you say are in your shop at any given time?

During a slow time, about 300.

Busy time, 600 to 800. And how many jobs would you say you're turning through every week? If I'm doing 15 pair of men's full recrafts, that's going to take me a whole week.

If I'm doing 50 pair of ladies' rubber heel tips,

it's maybe a day and a half or a day. If we're doing 30 pair of men's shoe shines, maybe five, six hours.

So all the jobs are definitely different.

McFarland's customers aren't all walk-ins. After decades in the business, he's developed a reputation in high-end shoe circles.
And people send in their shoes from all over the country.

Our mail-in business is huge. That's bigger than our walk-through-the-door business.
The people that seek us out, they don't balk at the price. But for a cobbler, not all shoes are welcome.

Don't bring me a pair of shoes that the cat completely ruined instead of using the litter box.

I don't want to smell it.

I'm not going to do it. That's coming up.

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In the course of working with shoes, a lot of cobblers become adept at leather work.

Many of them also offer minor repair services for belts, luggage, gloves, and handbags. But Jim McFarland says, more often than not, those jobs end up being a drag for the business.

Oh, this is my pet peeve. I hate this.
They'll come in and they say, I have a project for you. They'll come in with some purse that needs hand sewing all the way around it.

And it's like, if you want to spend $100 an hour, we'll be glad to give it a shot. And of course, they're not going to pay that.
So we try to avoid those.

A friend of mine has the best saying, if you can't wear it on your feet, then we're not repairing it.

McFarland Shoe Repair offers all kinds of shoe repair services. One is shoe stretching.
As we get older, our feet change. And sometimes our feet will widen a little bit or get a little longer.

And we can stretch for comfort, not for size. If somebody comes in and they wear a seven, we're not going to stretch that shoe to a nine.

If you come in and it's like these have gotten a little snug, we can make them better and that works.

Shoe shining, shoe refinishing, new bottoms on men's shoes and boots, ladies' heels, the little tips on the bottom.

ladies' sole protectors on the real high-end shoes like the Christian Louboutin red soles. We put lots of red soles on.
And of course, there's the occasional case of a dog getting into the closet.

Oh, man. Dog shoes are the worst.
I mean, you've got about a 5% chance of coming out of that one. What is it about the dog-chewed shoe that makes it tough? You have to replace the whole thing.

You know, if they chewed the heels, you got to replace all that. Most of the time, it's hundreds of dollars to do some of those types of repairs, and they want it to look like it did originally.

For a cobbler, the most intensive job is a full recraft.

There's well over 100 steps. I mean, you're talking cutting the sole off, sanding it, putting new cork in, picking the stitches, gluing them.

You're cleaning them, you're polishing them, you're re-nailing them, you're sometimes putting new shanks in them, you're channeling them to put the stitch in, gluing the sole.

I could just keep going on and on the list. Sounds like sometimes you're basically dissecting the entire shoe piece by piece and rebuilding it.
Oh yeah, some of them are insane what we do to them.

I can take the shoe, put it up to my eye, and you can look through the shoe and see my face because everything is completely stripped off the shoe except the piece of leather on the top.

So at that point, why not just like make your own shoes from scratch? A good shoe cobbler is going to restore that shoe back to its original factory condition.

A good shoemaker just makes a beautiful piece of art. If you call a shoemaker a shoe cobbler, he might hit you with his hammer.

It's a whole different trade, whole different set of tools for the most part. There's a real famous shoemaker that I'm friends with.

I sat and made a pair of shoes with him about six or seven years ago. It took me three days to make one pair of shoes.
My fingers and hands were so sore for days.

McFarland charges anywhere from $125 to $300 for a full recraft with new soles.

But he says that the smaller, high-volume jobs, like a standard $18 shoe shine, yield more profit on an hourly basis.

If we did a million shoe shines a year and nothing else, I would be a happy, happy man. You probably would make more profit than if you're doing

recrafts on high-end shoes because they take so long. I'm going to have four or five hours into that shoe.
And the quicker jobs? 15, 30 minutes.

About 10 years ago, McFarlane's gross sales were slipping by 5% each year. He started prioritizing cheaper, quicker jobs like shoe shines, reconditioning, and waterproofing.

And almost immediately, he saw more upside. The next year, our gross was still down a little bit, but our net had jumped up 15-20%.

So it's not all about how many shoes you're going to get in to put whole new bottoms on. It's just about shoe care in general.

Whether a job is big or small, McFarland prefers working on higher-end shoes. Because cheaper shoes, anything below $100 or so, according to McFarland, are a pain to work with.

They're made out of synthetic materials and they're not made to be repaired. They make them to throw away and buy another pair of their cheap shoes.

I don't like to say it's not worth it because you never know the situation. Sometimes it's a sentimental thing.
Well, they belonged to my brother and he passed away, so they mean a lot to me.

Okay, well, then that's got value to it. So let's see what we can do.
When doing all of this work, there are some basic shoe repair practices cobblers follow.

But everyone does things a little differently.

There's no standard technique, you know, because everybody was trained by their family and that's just the way they did it for 100 years. Full leather soles, for instance, on men's shoes.

Some guys will stain the bottoms differently. Some will paint them.
Some will leave them natural.

Some guys unnail the heel bases down from the outside, some from the inside.

Some people polish different. Some pull the knife towards them.
Some push it away. In recent years, McFarland's daughter and son have helped him share his techniques with the broader audience.

Under the moniker America's Cobbler, he has nearly 3 million followers across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

He posts videos chronicling the shoe repair process, plucking out nails, gluing and sanding soles, and brushing on fresh coats of polish.

You wouldn't believe how many people email me and say how therapeutic it is and they put their kids to sleep with it. You're subtly training the next generation of cobblers.

These kids don't know it, but they're learning shoe repair.

In some ways, teaching these skills to the next generation is a means of survival. So many people have forgotten about trades.
There's not many people learning on me.

Electricians, plumbers, especially shoe cobblers. It's all blue sky.
I mean, especially in my field. You learn how to be a good shoe cobbler and you go in the right location.

You're going to make a good living. Do you have a protege lined up? My nephew has been learning.
He's been in there three years. He definitely has another two years or so to go.

He's not putting on soles and heels yet, but that young man can clean and shine a pair of shoes better than I can.

I don't know if he'll be in there for the long haul or not, but my nephew's looking at sticking around for another generation.

Not every aging cobbler is so lucky. Not a lot of shoe cobblers get out and retire.
A lot of times you're going to find just one guy in there working. And

probably

65-70% of your shoe cobblers are 60 and over now. A lot of them don't want to do this forever.
They want to get out. I'm getting kind of tired.
I mean, I've done this 45 years now.

But even if Jim McFarland someday hangs his tools, he'll never stop judging your shoes. Nothing looks worse than a nice looking person in a nice looking suit with a cheap pair of shoes on.

It's like having a beautiful wedding cake and someone just goes and sticks their whole hand in it.

My grandfather used to say, A good haircut and a nice pair of shoes. You can go anywhere.

For the economics of everyday things, I'm Zachary Crockett.

This episode was produced by me and Sarah Lilly and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from Daniel Moritz-Robson and Dalvin Abuagi.

Do people bring in shoes that smell really bad? One time a guy brought some type of sneaker he wanted cleaned. We like triple bagged them and we could still smell them.

So we had to say, look, man, you gotta come pick these up. We can't work on them.

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