I was listening to Quentin Tarantino talk about video stores the other day. He is not exactly a well-renowned sneakerhead, yet his thoughts about the decline of Mom & Pop video stores had me thinking about the ‘90s sneaker market.

We had the Air Jordan 1 High OG “Lost & Found” drop in 2022, a shoe inspired by the unsold Jordan 1 “Chicago” stock of the ‘90s. Back then the silhouette would hit the sale racks at even $20-40 and still not sell. Thus you would find pairs aging away in the basement stockrooms of Mom & Pop stores out in the US. Mom & Pop stores are just the UK equivalent of independent businesses, an idea that in this day has disappeared off this high street with many saying “support your local”.

Anyway, Tarantino was reminiscing about the time he worked at the local video store, explaining the eventual decline of chains such as Blockbuster. He said that because of the new releases every week and month, the amount of stock that each store would acquire would compound over time. Of course, popular releases would continually get rented, whereas films with a smaller fanbase would fall to the wayside and end up being piled up in the back to make room for other popular releases.

Roger Avery says, “It’s literally a space issue”, in which Tarantino expands saying, “within three to four years you’re literally bursting out of the seams … now all of sudden your tapes are spine facing and it just never stops. If you have a chain you can move things around but if you’re a Mom & Pop that’s just it.”

This is no different to sneakers. However, in the ‘90s there was no internet and online shop spaces, at least not compared to the 2010s and 2020s. This meant that sneakers would eventually pile up and up until they ended up overflowing in the basement.

Similar to the film industry, the footwear industry also worked and works on a constant release cycle, with each month bringing in a new array of drops. This is why shoes would become so heavily discounted to the point where you had the sneakerheads from Japan and other celebrities such as Fat Joe coming into these stores to clear out basements worth of stock.

I thought it was an interesting comparison as I finally realised why exactly these Mom & Pop stores ended up having so much old stock. Even though I worked retail myself, it was a chain where stock was allowed to flow to-and-from the main warehouse (a warehouse which was not only many in number but rumoured to be the size of several football fields). So now I am able to understand these local touchpoints for footwear culture operated in the ‘80s and ‘90s.