‘Shine ’Em Up?’ More Often Now, the Answer Is No
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PostPosted: Thu, Nov 20 2008, 7:02 pm EST    Post subject: ‘Shine ’Em Up?’ More Often Now, the Answer Is No Reply with quote

An interesting article about the shoeshine business in Grand Central Terminal:



‘Shine ’Em Up?’ More Often Now, the Answer Is No

By SUSAN DOMINUS
Published: November 20, 2008

Professional men have their own version of the manicure, the hair coloring and the other grooming rituals that demand so much time from the confident, competent-looking businesswoman. It’s the shoeshine, a fussy rite that most women only occasionally indulge in, while many men regularly do.

The five shoeshine stands in Grand Central Terminal alone, with their stately mahogany leather and cherry wood chairs, normally polish the shoes of some 700 customers a day, the vast majority of them businessmen.

These days, says Eddie Ardaix, the owner of all five, make that 600. “The past two, three months, we’re down 100 shoeshines a day,” he said this week from behind the counter of his shoe-repair business at one of the stands, near Track 40.

Since he took over the business in 1999, he’s never seen anything like it, he said. Some customers have stopped coming altogether; even the fanatics, the customers who used to get their shoes shined five days a week, have dropped down to three.

Customers who never failed to get a shine after they had Mr. Ardaix or one of his employees repair the taps on the bottom of their shoes (for some men, a twice-monthly bit of upkeep) are putting the shoes back on and hitting the road, shine-free.

“They tell me, ‘maybe tomorrow,’ ” says Mr. Ardaix, 49. “The ones who said yes every day, now it’s one day yes, one day no.”

It says one thing about the psychology of a city when its freelance illustrators and preschool teachers and computer programmers start cutting back, en masse, on their $7-a-day Starbucks habits. It’s another when those masters of the universe — the bankers, the real estate wheelers and dealers, the crowd of the shiny-shoed, the ones you see sitting back and leafing through the Wall Street Journal as someone buffs the Prada loafers still on their feet — are watching every $4 they take out of their wallet.

In the now-replete body of journalism on how the wealthy are responding to the crisis, the Wall Street crowd usually talks about forgoing the summer-house kitchen renovation or the annual trip to St. Barts — or about how unseemly an extravagant Christmas party would seem.
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more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/21/nyregion/21bigcity.html?_r=1&hp
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