When Words Collide, Sentences Form

13 pairs of Starbury Ones, size 9, please.

Buy a pair of Stephon Marbury's $15 basketball sneakers (or more specifically, $14.98, I guess), the Starbury One, and you contribute to world peace, solving our nation's poverty problem and the continued effort of "cool" people to force "not-so-cool" people to wear really ugly stuff in attempt to get more people to laugh at them.

First of all, have you seen these things? There's a reason why they are $15...because you would be INSANE to spend more on them. They are ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly. And when you get done with that, they are still UGLY.

Case in point:

Marbury's intentions are good...provide a low-price sneaker to people who can't afford the $200 Air Jordans, etc, etc. He says he's going to wear them on the NBA court this season. I'm willing to be that he's going to do something like what tennis players have done for years with tennis racquets. If a player was endorsed by, oh, let's say Head racquets...but couldn't stand parting with their Prince racquet, then they would get a Prince racquet painted up to look like a Head racquet, all the way down to the Head logo stenciled on the strings. Don't be surprised if we hear reports of Marbury getting Jordans, minus all of the stitching and shape and form, and adding stupid random coloring.

Back to the good intentions. Marbury said, "Two hundred to buy pair of sneakers, that's groceries for the week." Yes, that's true. So a kid can now buy a pair of $15 sneakers and 6 days worth of groceries. But here's the scenario that I think will play out. The lower income families will be able to buy the NBA star's sneakers...so lots of little kids that ran around in generic sneakers before will now be able to buy the Starbury Ones. That is very cool. But the kids that can afford the $200 Jordans will ALSO want the $15 Starbury Ones. They will, however, now have enough money to purchase 13 pairs of Starbury Ones and still have $5 left over to purchase coordinating laces.

The $200 sneaker kids will start a trend where they are basically always wearing a shiny new pair of Starbury Ones...similar to how Nelly trades out his Air Force Ones every day for a new pair. The kids who can only afford one pair of the $15 Starbury Ones will then be wearing worn-in sneakers while their former-Air Jordan-pals have a rotating shoe rack.

I'm really only this cynical on Thursdays. Really.

posted by Steph @ 6:45 AM