Comment by lastofthemojito

I came across a copy of a 200-year-old newspaper for my town (not a big city) and the little thing that jumped out at me as I flipped through was that there were multiple advertisements for local shoemakers. Of course now there are no shoemakers around here, because who goes to a shoemaker right? You just buy the same Nikes or Dr Martens that are available everywhere. But before Zappos and before Payless and before the Sears Roebuck catalog, people still needed shoes, so we needed folks in each town to make them. It's one of those things that is completely obvious in retrospect but must have been a huge change to both shoemakers and shoe buyers as the transition happened.