Just had to spend 10 minutes listening to an old black boomer at work talking about how he needs to buy more cabinets to store his collection of 900+ pairs of shoes.
He's got a 4 bedroom house, lives alone, and has at least one bedroom devoted to his shoe collection.
Later in the conversation, I told him I had 5 kids then he responded with saying he was done after two.
Guess he wanted to focus on more important things like consooming shoes.
Secondly, It's just a collection, and some shoes can be worth a ton of money - especially vintage or special editions if they are in a mint state.
I collect old whisky, much of it so old that it would be nothing short of sacreligious to consoooom it. Granted I don't have a bedroom dedicated to the bottles but I do like the idea that someone was distilling this stuff decades before I was born, thousands of km away, and a little piece of the fruit of their labour is in my hands. I like admiring the weathered labels and thinking about how it came to be that some particular 50-60 year old bottle of scotch was not consumed.
Better that he's in that bedroom admiring his cabinets full of Nikes instead of out raping or stealing.
They only collect the shoes for the aesthetics. They are an expression of vanity.
With that said, shoes - from a collector standpoint - if you were to buy and keep them for a long time could yield profit. Like whisky, which is typically bought and consumed, shoes are bought, worn, used up and tossed in the garbage making certain old models a scarcity which in turn makes it a "store of value" in a sense (even more-so if they are autographed etc). Shoes aren't my thing and we can question if the primative mind of said jogger even realizes this to begin with, but it's not the worst thing to collect. To each their own - I think golf is stupid but there's people that play it and love it...