Matt's

I just spontaneously remembered a shoe store I went to a few years ago. I’d gone into the city to see a movie with a friend, but I was about an hour early, so I explored the area a little bit. I should explain that “the area” was Park Street by Boston Common.

I went down some sort of alley with some small storefronts. I found a shoe store, and, since I was in the market for new shoes, I stepped in.

First of all, every single person in the store — customer or employee — immediately turned around and stared at me. It wasn’t a quick glance up to see who came in the door, it was every single person turning around and giving me a deer-in-the-headlights look. It was exceptionally unnerving.

I might have thought I was on Candid Camera, except, as I adjusted to my surroundings, things got weirder. No one appeared to be looking at shoes. They were all just sitting around talking. Or, more accurately, looked like they had been, before they had all turned to face the intruder customer in their midst.

Before I turned around to leave, I noticed one last thing. The music. It was outrageously loud, bordering on the threshold of pain. And the music was exceedingly weird for a shoe store. Googling the lyrics, I just found the song I heard: Biggie Smalls’s “Dead Wrong”. I walked in just in time to hear, “I TAKE TOKES OF THE MARIJUANA SMOKE… THROW YOU IN A CHOKE. GUN SMOKE! GUN SMOKE!” (Incidentally, it turns out that this was the least-inappropriate part of the song.)

I left in a hurry and have used Zappos.com ever since.