Snake America Sixty Seven
Snake is a bi-weekly newsletter covering after-market salable goods. This week: WWII canvas deck shoes and a Hudson's Bay canoe paddle. Subscribe!
eBay: WWII-issue deck shoes, black and white, $250: How much does proximity bias and how much does trained eye play into whether the above-mentioned looks irreplicable? The difference between these old WWII sneakers and Vans from now is big. But am I maybe just tripping? Canvas sneakers, more than leather or suede, lend themselves well to reissues and re-makes. Canvas quality, my friend Nick who works in clothing tells me, hasn't really degraded(1). The Knockout Jordans that Nike re-made, a few years ago, replicating the canvas-edition Air Jordan 1s from 1985 that had, at that point, never been reissued, were better than the real thing(2). Leather is another story. Ycharts.com shows the commodities index for U.S. steer hide, the benchmark for leather, per WSJ, rising at the following rate:
I think that means it's more expensive now. This is a max chart, covering Jan. 1980 through right now. Steer hides started at $0.591 per pound, are now at $0.96. Hides' prices quickly fell after the index was introduced and then rose ... the price hitched high in Dec. 1986. I wonder if there were fewer or more cows that month, and that's what did it. I also wonder why they only started counting in January 1980. The rise of the leather pant abroad? Commodities are volatile and exports affect leather prices: The Government's Hides and Skins FAX page, which is updated weekly, here, breaks down the week ending July 9th:
Whole cattle hide sales of 443,100 pieces were primarily for China (281,500 pieces), South Korea (86,700 pieces), Mexico (45,100 pieces), and Thailand (11,700 pieces). ... Net sales of 106,300 wet blues for 2015 were down 36 percent from the previous week and 19 percent from the prior 4-week average. Increases were reported for Italy (47,500 unsplit), Taiwan (20,000 unsplit), China (10,000 unsplit and 5,500 grain splits), and Vietnam (9,600 unsplit).
Wet blues is blue-colored leather. The government counts it separately. Blue leather! Stands on its own. They are probably only being exported since Americans don't and won't wear blue leather. Harland M. Braun and Company, a company that does stuff to and with cows, in L.A., has a website which offers regular analysis in advance of the government's steer hides exports report. On June 29th, they predicted the following:
The noise coming out of China was the same old tune that we have been hearing for weeks on end. Poor domestic leather business, cash flow, and bank credit problems, along with a weak split market were the main complaints. It has to be believed that a good portion of the crying is understandable and undoubtedly due to the market related issues. ... The contractual performance by some Chinese tanners and less reliable Korean tanners may also affect the market.
I am left with many questions: Are the Chinese and Koreans necessary for hide tanning? Who is broke? Is everyone in the leather business broke? Can Americans do the tanning themselves? Why are Koreans less reliable? How much Mandarin or Korean does this guy know? How much steer hide gets stolen a week from the shop? Nick confirms canvas goes for now what it did then and leather goes for more now. Rubber's price I have to assume is the same, or sneakers hardly make a dent in the commodity. (Whereas most steer hide is made into footwear, according to the Intergovernmental Group on Meat.) There is no way rubber is going to get much more expensive. It's everywhere. Is leather really a commodity? Can commodities be elegant? Turning our attention to the shoes, they look, 70 years in, expensive. Almost luxe. A Japanese brand, Wakouwa, produces a similar pair:
I'm not going to sit here and spank these retros. They look good. The ball-of-the-foot stitching is flatter on the retro, whose lace holes don't pop out as much, than it is on the original WWII shoe. The laces are also really together on the new thing. The shoe looks giant. The black rubber is fine on both, the tongue too. The retro loses the lazy-S curve stitch on the ball of the heel and looks like a hot dog. Long more than fat--the auction shoe's toe comes in at a 45-degree angle. That one looks like a tugboat. Travelers say Vans models in Japan have different toebox shapes than ones here.
Nick also says companies make fewer suede sneakers now than they did 10 years ago, since suede is much more expensive now ... a suede sneaker will have a smaller profit margin than any other, like Dungeness crab(3) at a restaurant. None of this is reflected in the commodities literature on steer hides I've come across, but it's true.
Hudson's Bay Company canoe paddle, new: These are great. Hudson Bay is a bunch of malls in Canada that is older than the country or America. It started as a fur trading post in 1670. They've made those blankets since then, and the best ones are one-point-sized to cozy tea-kettles and when two of them are stuck together (very rare). Purple six-points go for the most money on eBay. Wool is somehow waterproof. The original color for the blanket, white with red yellow and green, can be overkill, but only in photographs. In person it's always great. The idea of Canada existing because it was first a mall is the best thing about it. It's better than its superior candy bars and inexpensive health care and higher education. Nearly everything that exists in North America exists because of that mall. First there was the mall, then everything else(4). You can't find good Hudson's Bay stuff in Canada since the stores don't mark things down and the country they helped found has no re-sale market. Not many people will buy these paddles for paddling. There's a coffee table book about Hudson's Bay Company that I think is written by their PR person, and has some cool photos.
I'm not sure about Barbie dating, but this one is from 1995. Every page on the book has a big letter, like that B, to start its one-sentence deck. For the first twenty pages I thought they were spelling something out. Then I was convinced it was alphabetical. None of the writing is very useful aside from the dates, which are also in an index in the back. Graydon Carter wrote the book's intro. At the age of 33, he was a writer-trainee at Time. He has more than one restaurant now as a side hustle. The intro may have taken him an hour.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
Last Snake: Denim pullover from WW2, Bloomsday shirts lot (For sale, sold)
Snake Before That: Sold item compendium (sold...)
(1) Confirming a suspicion...
(2) Since they weren't 30 years old. Not better if you don't mind yellow glue and dust.
(3) Dennis Leary is quotes here? I hope it's the same one.
(4) Well, not really ... Peter Matthiessen's books are the most elegant place to start.