I see today that Nike has filed a patent for self-lacing shoes.
I just keep missing these revolutionary breakthrough ideas. But to keep it in perspective, I also said no one would ever buy high priced coffee. And I thought the Mall of America was a gigantic waste of space and money. (My grandfather famously said that sliced bread wouldn’t make it either, it would dry out too fast, he said.)
But self-lacing shoes? I guess anything that saves time could be a winner these days.
Still, I would have loved to be in THAT product development meeting at Nike. ”Phil, seriously man, we can LACE THE SHOES UP for them!!”
“But why?”
“Well, some of the kids are too fat to bend over.
2. There appears to be an inconsistency of shoe-tying ability out there, sometimes our shoes become UN-TIED and ‘we’ get blamed for it,
3. We think there is a dumb-as-rocks market, yet untapped,
4. Much easier training program for our spokesmen, and
5. Four words: New Spokesman–The Situation.
10 users commented in " Was This a Problem? "
Pure.unadulterated.laziness.
Heck, I’m not even all that crazy about kids’ shoes with velcro. Ok sure, there’s a bit of lead time needed before very young children have the motor skills and coordination to tackle tying shoe laces and velcro does help a bit there. But now that my 4 yr old is pretty good about putting on his own shoes, we’re beginning to work on the lace-tying skills. Especially because of his high arches, old-school Converse shoes fit really well, so there’s yet another excuse to have more traditional laced shoes.
Maybe this is yet another symptom of my generational bias (I’m in the rough transitional gap between Boomer & Gen X), but I’m all for grounding kids in and teaching them with lots of low-tech, old-school, tactile activities. the more analog (a.k.a. non-digital), the better!
Rob,
I get that.
Sometimes we make things too easy. What happened to walking to school (up hill both ways) or even just riding the bike to school.
I wonder how many elementary schools even allow THAT?
[...] 31. Contrary to popular opinion, there are bad ideas. [...]
GL
We think there is a dumb-as-rocks market, yet untapped
You must not watch much TV, my friend. The d-a-r (I wrote DAR first but thought better of it. Strikethrough doesn’t work in comments.) market is thriving, and everything sells for $19.95.
I like the abrev.
Somehow it makes it even funnier.