Latest / Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People / Step Right Up! The Surprisingly Tragic History of Kinney Shoes

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Step Right Up! The Surprisingly Tragic History of Kinney Shoes · Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: Hey Kelly, how are you doing, man?
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: I'm doing great, Alex.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: How are you?
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: Again, I I realize that on dead ends we don't really introduce ourselves.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: We just dive right in.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: My name is Alex.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_02: I'm Kelly, and uh I I enjoy long walks on the beach, holding hands.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_02: Do you accept my dead end?
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I accept it.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: So um we've talked about shoes a few times on this show.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: Kind of a fetish.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, sure.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: So we've talked about the um X-ray shoe fitter, right?
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: We've talked about Dr.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: Shoulder.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: Dr.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: Shoulder.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe that's the two times we talked about shoes, right?
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_02: And it's kind of come up in other in other ways.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, I've I'm kind of obsessed with the types of businesses that used to exist, and then right when, like, right before that, they didn't they didn't get to enjoy like the the what we know as commerce today, right?
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: Instead, they just kind of fizzled out.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: They could have been huge.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Could have been huge.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: We don't know why they they didn't make it, but man, when you think about shoes, when you think about when we were kids, there was only one place to go get shoes, right?
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, let me think.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_02: Let me think.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_02: Was it no DSW?
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: No, that's for women, dude.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I don't know what you're into.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe maybe that's your thing.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: Was there a Ked's store?
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I'm talking about I'm talking about more like the whole family would go to get shoes here, probably.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: The mall?
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: Kenny shoes, man.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, Kenny's shoes.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: K-I-N-N-E-Y.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_02: Do you not remember Kenny Shoes stores?
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if I ever went into one, but I remember them, yeah.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_02: Short episode.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_02: This isn't like Atari where I where I took over.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_02: Are you kidding me?
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Kenny's shoes was huge.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: Kenny Shoes was huge.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: Is it is it K-I or K-E?
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_02: K-I-N-N-E-Y.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, Kenny Shoes.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: Kenny's shoes was so big.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I collect, you know, programs for sporting events, you know.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: And um, I have a a pro game program from the 1979 World Series, and in it, there's an advertisement for Kenny Shoes, and it says in it that they're the official shoe of the NBA.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: Really?
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: Now, if you're if you're listening, you don't know Kinney Shoes that we're talking about.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: It was a shoe store, but they also had their own house brand.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: You could buy other brands there, but they had brands, and it was like the kind of shoes that kids in school wore, and they weren't anything special.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: They were kind of you know, they they didn't look great.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but nobody athletic shoes weren't a big deal back then.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: Were they sneakers?
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, sure.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: Oh well, all kinds of shoes, all kinds of shoes.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, okay, the one I remember the most, the one that I wanted that my parents wouldn't buy me, was a shoe called the gas.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: Do you remember the gas?
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, wait, wait, wait.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: What were were they kind of like were they kind of like loafers?
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I don't know how you would describe these things or if they were boots or loafers, but they had like a rubber sole on them, yeah.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they're gonna be in recess with them.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but they weren't, yeah, like you could wear them to church, but also to recess, probably, right?
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I remember the Great American Shoe Store, G A S S.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: So, right.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: So, Kenny was known as the Great American Shoe Store, and then they had these shoes called the gas, and on the bottom of the shoes, so they were like rubber on the bottoms of them.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like I said, they kind of look like dress shoes, but then you if you turn them over on the bottom, they were kind of thick, yeah, yeah, really thick, and on the bottom it would spell out G A S S, like G period, A period, S period, S.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: And then when you're sitting, like if you're sitting and the teacher was singing or something, or if you're doing some I'm talking about elementary school, and you have some one of those kids sitting on the floor, and he would cover up that G, and the whole class would go crazy, man.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: It was the most profane thing you'd ever see.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: Those kids and and people would just like just lose their minds because the kid is basically saying ass in the class.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, very, very like on the on the down low, it was awesome.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: It was like a secret language.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: So today I was looking at gas shoes, which okay, by the way, just so ugly, but awesome looking.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: And they come up with they had versions for like adults, and there was a more of a dress shoe version, and it was called the gas light.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: I mean I kid you not.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, okay.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: It was literally a shoe called the gas light.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: Now, gaslight came from that term came from a movie that came out in the 40s, I think.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: But now people throw that word around all the time.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: Gaslight.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, um, but in the in the 70s and 80s, it didn't mean that.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: Like it but it was at a time when everything was starting to be light, like Bud, I think Bud Light came out around that time, and you know, okay, uh Pepsi light and all these different things, so you might as well have the gas light also.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: And it had was it L-I-T-E or L-I-G-H-T?
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, of course, L-I-T-E.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then of course, uh it had uh Velcro straps, you know, to lock it down.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: Uh just the ugliest shoe you've ever seen.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: Now, wait, wait, let's talk about the Velcro straps for a minute.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_02: Did the original Kenny's gas have the Velcro or that was it tie lace up?
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_02: I'm pretty sure that was a lace up.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: The Velcro came later.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_02: I was never I have some shoes now that are like slip-on and some that yeah, actually I do have a pair of tennis shoes that have Velcro.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_02: But hey, sketchers if you're listening, Skechers if you're listening, uh we're in your demo, man.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: I always thought Skechers all the time.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: Slip-ons.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I always thought though that Velcro shoes were for kids that didn't know how to tie their shoes.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_02: You know what I mean?
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: It was like, it was like, okay, they were they were not quite up to stuff.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, you know, that's if you were one of those kids, I'm not saying I was, that's a lifesaver, right?
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_02: True, true.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_02: You you didn't walk around with untied shoes all the time.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: So Kenny shoes ran that was it was in existence.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: It started in 1894.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: By a guy, and it was G.R.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: Kinney, uh, George Romanta Kenny.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: His dad ran into debt, and George uh vowed to pay his debts, and he bought uh a store called Leicester.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: It was a shoe store called Leicester, and grew that thing, took it on his own, and by 1929, there were 362 Kenny shoe stores in the US.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: By 1936, it was the biggest shoe store in the company.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: And in 1956, he sold it to the Brown Shoe Company.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: Now you know the Brown Shoe Company.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: Is that like Buster Brown?
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Buster Brown was a comic strip, and the Brown Shoe Company bought the rights to Buster Brown to be their like their little mascot.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: It was like a kid in a sailor cap with a with a dog, right?
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: You got it.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: Wasn't that Buster Brown?
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, he kind of looked like the Cracker Jack's kid.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: And then a brown shoe company sold it to Woolworth in um 1963.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: Woolworth, the place that has all the Popeel items.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: So full circle.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: So then this is funny because Kenny split their shoes uh stores into kind of four divisions in the in the 60s, late 60s and early 70s.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: They split it into four divisions.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: They split it into Kenny, which is more like the family, you know, buying your kids church shoes and school shoes.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: Then there was a budget store called Style Co.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: Do you ever remember?
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: And these were all in the malls.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: You remember Style Co?
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: Great name.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: Then the women's store, and you could picture this right next to a B.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: Dalton's, probably.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: It was called Bookstore.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: It was called Suzy Casuals.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_02: Do you remember Suzy Casuals?
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I don't.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_02: My mom worked at Casual Corner.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_02: You remember Casual Corner?
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but but I don't remember Susie Casuals.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: And then the fourth one, the division that they had, was actually called was actually Foot Locker.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: Which didn't exist.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: So that was the one that kind of made it on its own.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: And Kenny only lasted until 1998.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: They had they had spun off the Foot Locker brand.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, by the time they closed, they had 467 stores.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um and they were out.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: But when I was doing the research on this thing, I was just tickling myself, watching all these different uh looking at all these different names of shoe stores.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: Because you could really get pun happy when you come to when it comes to shoe store, shoe store and barber shops, I think, are the best like pun heavy uh things.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna give you some names of shoe stores, and you tell me uh if they're real or fake, okay?
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, okay, I got this.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: All right, do you got this?
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: All right, yeah.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: How about uh do you uh what about uh Tom McCann?
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's real.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's real, but it's not a real person.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, they they they used that name because they thought that apparently Scottish people were known for like good quality shoes, so they invented a Scottish sounding name called Tom McCann.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think I remember that one actually.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: Tom with a Tom with a T H McCann, just M C A N.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: Tom McCann.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: Tom McCann.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh what about foot quarters?
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, that's actually real.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: That was a Kenny Shoe division.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: That was their dis their discount.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: It was the discount version of Foot Locker.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, and by the time they closed, there were a hundred uh more than a hundred foot foot quarters.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: Bad name.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's pretty bad name.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it sounds like your your foot's been chopped into four pieces.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_02: What about heel deal?
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_02: He that's fake.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_02: That's fake.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_02: That's fake.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, what about shoe carnival?
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna say it's real because it sounds so bad.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: Shoe carnival is not only real, but I've been there and it's a crazy atmosphere.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: You go in there and it's very discount, very warehousey, and every now and then like wrong things in boxes, dude.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: Every now and then somebody gets on a microphone and they announce some sort of contest, and they have like all these wheels that you can spin and games that you can play to get discounts.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's madness.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_02: So it is actually a carnival.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: It is.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: What about sock and soul?
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: Sock and soul that sounds real.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: S O L E.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: Sock and Soul.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: That's fake.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's fake.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, okay.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: What about just for feet?
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that was real.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: I know that one.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: That was real.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: It went bankrupt in 2000.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: That's a bad name.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: Just for feet.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: What about uh Toe Depot?
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: Fake.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: That's fake.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: What about Shoe Show?
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: Fake.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: That's actually real.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's a regional chain that has over 1,100 stores.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: Regional with 11.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, that's yeah.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: I think I I don't know what part of the country.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: Shoe show.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, what about boot bazaar?
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh fake.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: That's fake, right?
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: What about shoe town?
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's real.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's real.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's in the northeast.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's a bargain.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: Have you ever seen one?
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: Shoe town?
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, never been there.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: What about well, stride right?
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's real.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_02: I remember it's it's R-I-T-E.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_02: I remember that one.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_02: That was also a brand of shoes.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: And it's only online now.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that was a brand of shoes.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: What about Happy Heels?
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: Fake.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: That's fake.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um what about Pickway?
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: Real.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's real.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: Lace Place.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: Fake.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: Payless Shoe Source.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: That's real.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: Real uh closed in 2019 but relaunched online.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: What about Wild Pear?
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I'm gonna say real.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: Kenny Kenny Shoe's own Wild Pear that was a flashy kind of mall store in the 80s and 90s.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: And finally, what about Soul Survivors?
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: S-O-L-E.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: Soul Survivors.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh, I'm gonna say fake.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_02: It's fake, you're right.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: You did pretty good on that.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: You did pretty good on that.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I'd heard I'd heard of most of the real ones, and I think where I think where I was able to tell the fake ones after a little while was they sounded too good.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_02: Like it too much rhyme, too much pun.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: Well, there were two big spokespeople for Kenny, um, that I remember in the 70s, and that and they had kind of two advertising campaigns.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: They had Ken Barry.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: Do you remember Ken Barry?
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: He was like in a lot of Disney movies, and no, um he was uh like in the the Shaggy DA.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: Do you remember that movie?
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, okay.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_02: I can probably picture him.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: Sure, and he would like do singing and dancing, a real cheesy kind of up with people kind of guy.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: He would do he would do like comedy, comedy uh bits with Kenny shoes, and um that was like kind of like for a broad audience, and then they had kind of the more athletic uh ads, and that was uh Bruce Jenner, not Caitlyn Jenner, but Bruce Jenner was the Kenny uh spokesperson um uh back then, and like I said, they would you could buy the Kenny shoes would have the NBA logo on them because they were gonna deal with the NBA.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: And the funny part is you know Adidas is famously the three-stripe shoe, right?
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: That's yeah, yeah.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: Three stripes.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: Some Kenny shoes had two stripes and some had four.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_02: They were surrounded, they were surrounding Adidas.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_02: I've always heard Europeans say Adidas.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: Adidas, right, right, right.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: And but I never remember back then, I remember remember counting the stripes or even knowing that that was a thing.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: But um, but them Kenny shoes, man, they didn't last long.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: They were kind of broke down, yeah.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but they weren't bad looking.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: The the athletic shoes weren't terrible looking back then, but the um the casual shoes were a little ugly.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: Ugh, yeah.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: And women's too.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: They had women's shoes.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um picture like lots of like clogs, you know.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: Have you ever seen clogs?
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: Women were really into those.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_02: Did did you I'm sure you know this, but what um Adidas supposedly stands for?
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_02: What's that?
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_02: Really?
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's not your thing.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_02: I think I I think I do know this, but what all day all day I dream about sports.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_02: Oh.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_02: Or sex, depending on depending on how old you are.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know what's a good movie?
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: Have you ever seen a movie Air?
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: Came out a few years ago, and it is a story about the um Michael Jordan going in, and there um it's a story about Nike landing their deal with Michael Jordan.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, okay.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_02: I think I heard about this or maybe saw a trailer for it.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the genius part of the movie is that Michael Jordan is not a character in the movie.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: You you like see him only like from the back, and he doesn't, but his mom is, and is and and they kind of dealt with his mom.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: And when they made that deal with Michael Jordan and Nike decided to throw their lot in, that changed everything in terms of athletic shoes.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, then if you wanted to compete, you had to get high elite uh athletes.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: Because when you think about it, it doesn't make a lot of intuitive sense because most people aren't playing basketball.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: And at that level, not at that level, so it wouldn't make a lot of sense that you would have somebody like that pitch shoes.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: But let me put it this way, Alex.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_02: I would be just as good at basketball in a pair of Kenny's as I would in in some Jordan Ayers.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: But that actually changed everything, it changed the game and it ultimately put places like Kenny Shoes out of business.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you could not compete with the Nike and the Adidas.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you just couldn't couldn't do it.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so um that was one of the huge things that put them out.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_01: And on 1998, they were really struggling, but you know, also their strategy was malls, you know, and once malls started kind of going out of favor, that was that was the the death knell to Kenny Shoes.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: So those those two things, um, pretty significant um challenges to them.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um so yeah, that's uh that's Kenny Shoes and Long Live Foot Locker.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_02: Long live Foot Locker, and uh if you're if you're uh our age, long live Hoka.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: Let us know stiff, it's borderline snurred.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: Velcro strap screamin', I got it all face, you just looking pretty scoring straight from outer space, but these bricks I screwed practical surf like level and trapped in the shoe gel fleveling.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: Let us come like a discount.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: Looking down the hole here with left screaming the screen flipping down here, fast enough to leave breaking little.