I feel for this kid. I was about 6'5'' as a high school freshman, landed at 6'7''

When your feet are size 12, you can still find shoes pretty much anywhere. size 13 is when it starts to get difficult. size 14 is when the guy at the shoe store says "We might have one pair someplace."

In my early 30's I started doing distance running. Nobody told me that when you do that your feet get bigger, dammit. That's when I crossed the barrier to size 15, the wasteland where shoes just plain don't exist. You can find them on Zappos, but only tiny handful manufacturers go to that size. The selection is awful. I haven't paid less than $250 for shoes in years, unless I find them on clearance, and they are all ugly.

Ended at size 16. Hopefully.

Obscene_CNN: Go to a cobbler.

Guessing $2k per pair. He really should have two pairs, and they will wear out every 3 months.

waxbeans: bayoukitty: I feel for this kid and his mom. Fortunately, my son stopped at size 15 shoes. You can find them, but it's not easy or cheap. Usually one or two pairs in a store, so you better like one of them. The last pair of work boots he got had to be ordered and took six weeks to arrive.

Odd. I had a girlfriend in the mid 1990s and yeah shoes was hard for her to find. She was like 5'11. But the fix was we had to go to the other side of town.
Guess this kid is what happens when a city is alllllll just one set of people.
If so.
Hahaha haha Hahaha.

I dated a 6'2'' woman for a while, can't remember her shoe size but I think it was 12. She told me she could find shoes, but the biggest market for large shoe-sizes in women's styles were shoes for drag queens. So she ended up having a lot of really fabulous shoes. She really preferred her shoes to be understated, but that was rarely an option for her.

tembaarmswide: leviosaurus: I feel for this kid. I was about 6'5'' as a high school freshman, landed at 6'7''

When your feet are size 12, you can still find shoes pretty much anywhere. size 13 is when it starts to get difficult. size 14 is when the guy at the shoe store says "We might have one pair someplace."

In my early 30's I started doing distance running. Nobody told me that when you do that your feet get bigger, dammit. That's when I crossed the barrier to size 15, the wasteland where shoes just plain don't exist. You can find them on Zappos, but only tiny handful manufacturers go to that size. The selection is awful. I haven't paid less than $250 for shoes in years, unless I find them on clearance, and they are all ugly.

Ended at size 16. Hopefully.

Obscene_CNN: Go to a cobbler.

Guessing $2k per pair. He really should have two pairs, and they will wear out every 3 months.

yeah.  I remember that there were always dozens of varieties of sneakers available but, that I was restricted to the ones that they had a 'size 13' in stock.  I should be glad that I didn't need 14's or above because finding 13s was hard enough back then.

It's actually gotten worse. When I was in high school, the local shoe shop would always try to keep a few large pairs in stock. Now that brick and mortar stores have to compete with the Internet they can't afford that, they only stock what they know they can sell.

Feel_the_velvet: Poor kid.  14 is still well within the "why can't I just be like everyone else" age.

leviosaurus: n my early 30's I started doing distance running. Nobody told me that when you do that your feet get bigger, dammit. That's when I crossed the barrier to size 15, the wasteland where shoes just plain don't exist. You can find them on Zappos, but only tiny handful manufacturers go to that size. The selection is awful. I haven't paid less than $250 for shoes in years, unless I find them on clearance, and they are all ugly.

Uh oh.  How long before that started kicking in?  And what distance is "distance running"?  Asking for a...friend

It took me about a year, I think. But I was one of those "Never done any real athletic stuff before" types. I took it slow; it was probably two months before I ran a mile without stopping. At the end of the year I ran a half marathon. After that I was running about five miles every day. YMMV.

Don't let it stop you from running though. Running is awesome.