My Shoe Experiment: K-mart versus Payless

I did some research after I bought the girls's shoes from both stores and here's what I found. First, I wanted to visit the Payless website to see if they had anything interesting to say. The first thing I noticed was that you can buy shoes online from their website. Their website is not bad and I've including a few snipes of what I saw on their website. I also learned that they have over 4,000 physical stores in the Americas. Next, I visited K-mart's website to see what it looked like. I personally like K-mart's website better and you can also buy a whole bunch of stuff online from their website. K-mart also lets you rate their products. I noticed that Payless does not let you rate their products and their products are not the best priced out there. I looked at the girl's shoes section on the K-mart website and found the shoe that I had bought from the physical store. I tried looking for more information about K-mart and learned that it was founded in 1899. I didn't realize that the store had been around for so long. This article refers to buying shoes from a physical store and not from their online websites.

Most of the advertising that I remembered from Payless was from their TV ads. The advertising apparently had caught my attention and it looked like it might be worth giving Payless a try and see how buying shoes from that store would turn out. The children needed new shoes for the start of the school year and I let them pick out whatever they wanted to wear.

The physical Payless store that I went to was located in a shopping mall. The first thing that I noticed about the store was that it was very cramp. The store had tried to fit as many shelves filled with shoes in a very small space. There was enough room for about one person in each aisle, giving the store a claustrophobic feel to it. The shoe selection was limited and composed of mostly generic shoes. The shoes that the children wanted were in the $20 to $25 range. I didn't really care for the shoe selection. The current deal at the time was buy one and get one at 50%. Buying four pairs of shoes still cost roughly $80 (that's including tax) even with the deal going on.

The children wore the shoes that they got at Payless for roughly one month before they started to fall apart. Pictures of the worst pair of shoes are included. The shoes were literally falling apart after just a little use. I have bought a lot of shoes before and never have I seen shoes fall apart that quickly before.

I decided that Payless was not such a good value and decided to try a different store. K-mart is not my favorite store but I do know of other people who have shopped there and found some decent items for sale there. The children still needed shoes and I thought that I would give K-mart a shot. The K-mart that I visited was an older store that was sort of run-down. It had a decent selection of a lot of things. I bought several shoes and other items from K-mart. The shoes were reasonably priced and about the same price as the shoes at Payless. I have also included a picture of a pair of shoes from K-mart which costs roughly $25 which are still in good shape after 5 months of use and look like they will last for awhile.

Even though K-mart is not my favorite place to shop, it ended up being a better deal as far as the children's shoes go. I paid about the same amount of money at both stores but the quality of shoes at K-mart were surprisingly better than the quality of shoes at Payless. If you are looking to purchase children's shoes, I would definitely choose K-mart over Payless. If you want to waste your money on low quality shoes, then you can shop at Payless which has proved to give you much less for your money.