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.
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...