Shoe customers 'weigh' their options

Before Jason Fried was a best-selling author. Before building the profitable-from-day-one technology startup Basecamp. Even before designing websites for other people. Jason Fried sold shoes. 

It was a good job because it taught him an important lesson. He wrote in the foreword to Demand Side Sales 101:

“I noticed that when people browsed shoes on a wall, they’d pick a few up and bounce them around in their hand to get a sense of the heft and feel. Shoes go on your feet, but people picked the shoe with their hands. If it didn’t feel good in the hand, it never made it to their foot.”

Ask people about buying shoes and they’d never mention this.

Watch people buying shoes and you’ll see something like this. 

Fried does not elaborate on why. Finding an answer doesn’t matter as much as asking the question. 

Customers do things that appear odd because customers have a different view of the world. They have their own goals with their own tradeoffs. The customer is always right.