The cobbler quietly worked on the dress shoes, right before my mesmerized eyes. He put glue into the sides of the shoes that were opening up, pounded in mails to the bottom to keep the glue in place, applied new bottoms to hide the nails, and finally polished the shoes to give them a brand-new shine. All this happening within 30minutes for equivalent of 20 US dollars in a shipping container-turned-personal workshop placed smack on the sidewalk of the busiest financial street in all of Seoul.
After admiring Asia's superb public transportation system as well as cost-efficient and convenient compactness of her urban areas, the lingering existence of many traditional service professions in Asian cities also becomes a phenomenon worth a few words of praise. While the likes of such humble shoe cobbler can be rarely seen on the streets of the US, in Asia they continue to provide their, indeed, still popularly used, services to the general populace.
But, alas, as Western concepts of materialism take hold in Asian consumer culture (in the form of incessant demand for newer and better products), such sight of cobblers plying his trade on the street-side will no doubt become rarer and rarer. As I sat there looking at the old cobbler with his rough hands permanently darkened by industrial coloring for the shoes, I cannot help but wonder if he will ever have an apprentice as enthusiastic and diligent in the tasks of fixing the shoes of random passersby.
The shoe cobbler will no doubt be the latest victim in a series of "disappearing professions" as human societies develop from manual to mass-manufactured. As newer and better products are more cheaply made in larger quantities, those living by that one skill of the hands one day find their skills to be no longer useful. Factories once outproduced family workshops and driven them out of business with chap prices. Now the same factories are producing so much as to even make the concept of repairing broken products anachronistic.
As the lighthearted modern consumers resort to throwing out the broken products because the financial and time costs of repairing them are simply too high in comparison to buying new replacements, one wonders if those skilled labor doing the repairs deserve some sort of professional protection. Both economic and environmental factors may attest to the need to not passively letting such basic but previously venerated service positions to just disappear.
The two factors are related and easy to explain. Mass manufacturing, by simplifying production procedures and taking advantage of economy of scale in production, has in the process led to massive use of limited natural resources that cannot be possibly sustainable over time. As the raw materials for new products begin to run short and both production and retail costs of the new products increase over time, there will be, at some point in the near future, when repairing the old products become not only economic feasible but also often the only alternative available to the consumer.
Or perhaps even before the economically necessary point is reached, the environmental awareness of the general populace will catch up and trump the benefit of "convenience" of buying new products. As eco-friendliness continues to become the chic and cool concept in the developed world (and increasingly so in the developing world as well), it is not hard to imagine when sporting obviously repaired goods would be just as trendy as, say, eating organically produced foodstuffs.
Obviously, that point in time, for each distinct product, will happen at different points in time. For some products such as shoes, the time may not even come during the working lifetimes of the cobblers like the one I visited in Seoul. And without viable measures, the unique skills of such people may go straight to the graves with them without being passed down. When repairing becomes fashionable again in the future, there may not be anyone left who knows how to perform the necessary repairs.
Thus, as the future of disappearing professions like cobblers remains largely in doubt, the question one must ask is whether governments and/or societies in general have the responsibility to protect these useful skills for the future. Even as the businesses of the cobblers become unprofitable, perhaps the state can consider putting at least some of the most skilled ones on government salary so that there is time for their skills to be properly recorded for future reference?
After admiring Asia's superb public transportation system as well as cost-efficient and convenient compactness of her urban areas, the lingering existence of many traditional service professions in Asian cities also becomes a phenomenon worth a few words of praise. While the likes of such humble shoe cobbler can be rarely seen on the streets of the US, in Asia they continue to provide their, indeed, still popularly used, services to the general populace.
But, alas, as Western concepts of materialism take hold in Asian consumer culture (in the form of incessant demand for newer and better products), such sight of cobblers plying his trade on the street-side will no doubt become rarer and rarer. As I sat there looking at the old cobbler with his rough hands permanently darkened by industrial coloring for the shoes, I cannot help but wonder if he will ever have an apprentice as enthusiastic and diligent in the tasks of fixing the shoes of random passersby.
The shoe cobbler will no doubt be the latest victim in a series of "disappearing professions" as human societies develop from manual to mass-manufactured. As newer and better products are more cheaply made in larger quantities, those living by that one skill of the hands one day find their skills to be no longer useful. Factories once outproduced family workshops and driven them out of business with chap prices. Now the same factories are producing so much as to even make the concept of repairing broken products anachronistic.
As the lighthearted modern consumers resort to throwing out the broken products because the financial and time costs of repairing them are simply too high in comparison to buying new replacements, one wonders if those skilled labor doing the repairs deserve some sort of professional protection. Both economic and environmental factors may attest to the need to not passively letting such basic but previously venerated service positions to just disappear.
The two factors are related and easy to explain. Mass manufacturing, by simplifying production procedures and taking advantage of economy of scale in production, has in the process led to massive use of limited natural resources that cannot be possibly sustainable over time. As the raw materials for new products begin to run short and both production and retail costs of the new products increase over time, there will be, at some point in the near future, when repairing the old products become not only economic feasible but also often the only alternative available to the consumer.
Or perhaps even before the economically necessary point is reached, the environmental awareness of the general populace will catch up and trump the benefit of "convenience" of buying new products. As eco-friendliness continues to become the chic and cool concept in the developed world (and increasingly so in the developing world as well), it is not hard to imagine when sporting obviously repaired goods would be just as trendy as, say, eating organically produced foodstuffs.
Obviously, that point in time, for each distinct product, will happen at different points in time. For some products such as shoes, the time may not even come during the working lifetimes of the cobblers like the one I visited in Seoul. And without viable measures, the unique skills of such people may go straight to the graves with them without being passed down. When repairing becomes fashionable again in the future, there may not be anyone left who knows how to perform the necessary repairs.
Thus, as the future of disappearing professions like cobblers remains largely in doubt, the question one must ask is whether governments and/or societies in general have the responsibility to protect these useful skills for the future. Even as the businesses of the cobblers become unprofitable, perhaps the state can consider putting at least some of the most skilled ones on government salary so that there is time for their skills to be properly recorded for future reference?
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