Perfect Shoe Repair

 

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ally s.

Long Island City, Queens, NY

11/5/2009

AVOID AT ALL COSTS! If I could give this place 0 stars, I happily would. That would be the only happy part of my experience, alas.

I took a beautiful pair of vintage boots in very good condition here to have the shafts stretched slightly, and got them back ruined. As in, they came out of the back room with the leather at the top of one of the boots ripped, and with weird bulges in the leather. Turns out that instead of using a boot stretcher (a piece of machinery shaped like a calf, which the cobbler gradually widens until the boots are evenly stretched), this dude had just shoved large pieces of raw plywood into the shafts. When he brought them out, the wood was still in the boots, packed so tightly that he couldn't get it out.

Well, now I have torn boots in two colors of leather (since it didn't stretch evenly). There are random bulges in the shape of pieces of wood permanently impressed in the leather, plus jagged slivers of wood embedded on the inside where the splinters caught as he tried to take the wood out.

The worst part is that he had the effrontery to tell me that "everybody does boots this way" and that the leather tearing at the top was "normal." I'll admit that I was definitely pushing back by this time (... NORMAL? are you KIDDING?), but he was incredibly  condescending and nasty about the entire thing.

I'm heartbroken that he effed up my beautiful boots, but I'm more pissed off that he has the gall to pretend that his "work" was anything approaching professional. Save yourself the time, money, and anger by avoiding this place and finding a real shoe repairman with the actual tools of the trade.

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