When Addy Tritt was 25 years old, she went to her local Payless shoe store in Hays, Kansas, a few years ago. She didn’t intend to walk out with the last of the store’s inventory.
The store was going out of business and had slashed its prices. When the last 204 pairs of footwear dropped to $1 each, Tritt figured she could buy some and donate them somewhere.
“My pile just kept growing bigger and bigger,” said Tritt. She finally went up to the sales associate and asked, “Can you get me a deal on all of these shoes?”
After a few phone calls to the Payless corporate office, Tritt was in possession of all the remaining shoes, valued at approximately $6,000. She purchased them for about $100.
“I’m a college student. I don’t have a lot of extra money to be throwing around,” she said. “I don’t know why I did it―I just did. It’s part of being a human.”
Tritt decided to send the shoes to Nebraska, where epic flooding had destroyed millions of dollars in crops, injured and killed several people, damaged homes and deeply impacted farmers. “Any shoe is better than a wet shoe,” she said.
