High Quality Trash™

Shoes are one of the things that separates us from other species. Not only are shoes fabulous, but they protect our soft and not-very-well-designed feet from threats both foreign and domestic. Every single toe that I ever broke got that way while I was not wearing shoes.

Despite their incalculable value to the human race, many people maintain a shoeless home. Some of them believe that forcing people to remove their shoes before entering will help keep their floors clean from the various things that exist outside.

Now, I’m not a barbarian. If I am entering the home of someone from a culture in which wearing street shoes inside is a sign of disrespect, or if my shoes are covered in snow, mud, blood, condiments of any sort, lava, excrement, concrete dust, or biomedical hazardous waste, I’m of course going to take them off. And I don’t really need to be told to do so.

But barring shoes outright just to keep your floors clean is bringing a gun to a pillow fight. Turns out there’s already an effective old-fashioned way to achieve your goal of a clean floor while neither insulting my hygiene habits nor endangering my delicate, vulnerable, long-suffering feet: It’s called a doormat.

In other shoeless homes, it isn’t the dirt that owners fear. It’s the germs. For these folks, shoes are superspreader events. They likely got freaked out by a 2008 study by scientists at the University of Arizona that found that 96% of shoe soles have fecal bacteria like E. coli on them. Gross, right? Shoes are the devil.

Oh, wait. Turns out E. coli is EVERYWHERE ALREADY. You’re probably sitting in a big pile of it right now. “When people see [the Arizona study] they just are horrified,” says Elizabeth Scott, professor of microbiology at Simmons University and a founding member of the International Forum on Home Hygiene. “For me that’s no surprise at all. E. coli is everywhere.”

So what about babies? They are fecal bacteria machines. I asked Dr. Scott if having a baby in your house is actually more dangerous to home cleanliness than my shoes. “Don’t quote me saying that,” she says, “but baby poop sure is.”

What about pets? Think, if you dare, about what comes in on the bottoms of their already-shoeless feet. Yet, I don’t see these homeowners forcing their guests to leave their babies and dogs out on the front stoop, do I? Hypocrisy, thy name is [insert name of person with shoeless home here].

Instead, shoeless-home owners prefer to do the easy thing, and point at my shoes and deliver the unspoken message, “Kris, welcome to our home, where your filth is filthier than the filth we already have all over our floors.”

To add to the ignominy, next comes the physical challenge of actually taking off the shoes. Unless there is a thoughtfully placed stool, bench or chair at the entrance to the shoeless home, shoed visitors are required to lean against a wall to take off the shoes. What if the visitor is elderly or infirm or just has bad balance? Due to my broken toes and related joint maladies, it is difficult for me to take off my shoes even in the best of conditions. What if I topple over and injure one of my few undamaged body parts while complying with your ridiculous shoeless-home diktat? Once you stop laughing, you’ll feel really guilty about it.

Once shoeless, feet are utterly vulnerable to myriad household threats: chair legs, bed posts, door jambs, dropped knives, random Lego pieces, and God forbid anyone has been playing jacks.

Also consider the not-small threat to hosiery. No nylons can survive a night shoeless. Why don’t I just leave my shoes on and give you the amount of money I would have spent replacing the shredded Wolfords? You can use it to hire a housecleaner to mop up after my shoe detritus. Keep the change (there will definitely be some).

Please don’t offer me a pair of guest slippers. Do I look like I want to wear a pair of nasty slippers previously worn by potentially tens of strangers before me? There’s dried-on foot sweat and dead skin in those things. I’ll stick with the E. coli, thanks.

If you do keep a shoeless home, you should also know that you are probably endangering your family’s health, not just their feet. Exposure to low-level filth, like that tracked in by friends who refuse to remove their shoes, actually helps bring a little bit of the outside in. Engaging with outdoor microbiomes is, Dr. Scott says, one of the ways that human immunity is developed. You love your children, the little fecal bacteria bombs, don’t you? They gotta eat some dirt in this life, so why not get them started at home? They’ll grow up healthy and strong and go on to get great jobs and make lots of money and support you in your old age.