mytropicalescape.com

Or, another title could have been “A twenty-year relationship gone bad.” I have been running in Nike sneakers for over twenty years. The other day I was out for a nice easy trot (my left knee has been bothering me lately) listening to Lucky Dube on my IPOD when I realized, the $120 sneakers on my feet have probably traveled more than some people, possibly more than me? This claim is unsubstantiated (read below for more details), but let’s say the components needed to make Nike sneakers come from the Philippines and then maybe they are manufactured in China. Once completed I am certain that they are shipped across the pacific by sea to the USA and we’ll assume the boat might stop in American Samoa, Hawaii, Saipan and Guam along the way. That is a lot of travel for a pair of sneakers and it doesn’t even include the train trip across the USA to get to the sporting goods store on the east coast.

The way my mind works, and because I am trained as a human geographer, I thought I would write to Nike to try and get information about the travels of running sneakers. Truly, I wanted to know, where do the people live who make these sneakers? What are their houses made of? How do they get to work, rickshaw, bike, or bus? What do they eat? Unfortunately, I am pretty certain the customer service drone that received my email thought I must have been absolutely out of my tree! I can almost hear him in the break room now talking to his colleagues, “oh yeah, you think your day is going bad, some yahoo wants to know how our sneakers travel to the USA…” However, before you go thinking that they are correct, we must remember that Nike is a humongous company with 43% of market share when it comes to sneakers. So, where their sneakers come from and where they are going impacts a lot of lives. Also, it is not like I demanded to speak with Phil Knight (founder of Nike) for this information, I just wanted what any seventh grader would have requested if they were doing a report on Nike.

In my note to them I stated right up front that I was not writing a hard hitting article on their labor practices (of which there are many), or calling them out for sponsoring some athlete with a contract that exceeds the GDP of many developing countries. NO, I affirmed that I was writing a humorous article for a dumb little travel website I have. Really, what do they do if a high school kid calls up looking for information on the sneakers? And I am not even equating the importance of my pathetic piece with a seventh grade homework assignment.

In the end, Nike never did provide one ounce of useful information but the “customer service” rep did not forget to tell me to get a Nike Id (whatever that is?) so that I could customize sneakers and purchase MORE Nike gear. Truly, I’d like to tell them what they can get, but after twenty years I am not sure I am ready to change sneaker manufacturers.