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Comment by dmurray | Hacker News Reader

4% of the workforce being shoemakers seems enormous. One person working full time making shoes for every fifty-ish adults?

I don't know what the right comparison is today. According to [0], the fashion industry accounts for about 3% of world GDP. Perhaps shoes are a quarter of that?

[0] https://fashinnovation.nyc/fashion-industry-statistics/

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I assume 1) people walked a lot more, 2) shoes took longer to make, and 3) didn't last as long which means more people necessary to handle demand. I could be completely off, though.

Exactly, walking! Something few of us do these days even at short distances. I prefer shoes that can recobbled but I know from the dwindling numbers of cobblers that I'm a shrinking demographic.

Point 3 is the key one - soles, especially. Rubber soles weren't a thing - they were made of leather (or sometimes textiles) and they wore out in a matter of a couple months or even a few weeks with heavy usage, especially give point 1. Point 2 isn't really the case - your later period and fancier pointed-toe, lace-and-ribbon-bedecked shoes for the higher classes took probably some time, but a pair of common leather turn-shoes can be made in a couple hours.

They were serving a lot of customers from outside the city who would occasionally visit to trade and shop.

The shoemakers also repaired and maintained shoes. They would replace soles, repair holes etc.

That's an argument for needing fewer people, not more - since it happens in situations where it's less labour-intensive to repair shoes than to make them from scratch.

Not necessarily. If the materials are expensive, paying somebody to repair a shoe can be the cheaper option.

I think people still repaired socks after knitting them was automated for that reason.

The first automated knitting machine was from 1589. Queen Elizabeth I denied its inventor a patent “because of her concern for the employment security of the kingdom's many hand knitters whose livelihood might be threatened by such mechanization” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lee_(inventor))

Edit: maybe not. https://www.historylink.org/File/5721 learned me that gear for us soldiers in World War One was knitted manually. Maybe, those machines weren’t used (much) yet by then?

Isn't the main reason that making from scratch is less labour-intensive than repairing because of mass production?

With medieval production methods, I would bet that making from scratch is significantly more labour-intensive than repairing.

It does seem a bit strange, you're right. When you read into it though, this city seemed to have a higher cobbler population than most, as alluded to by the author.

> They were organized in different guilds, based on the street in which they kept their shops. In 1360, nine cobblers’ guilds were attested in documents, all situated within the city’s walls

I know almost nothing about medieval France, but perhaps peasants from smaller surrounding cities may have come to this one to learn or work, leading to this skew?

There's always an overlap of skills. Cobblers may have been tailoring on the side but wouldn't be counted as such. I've been to many dry cleaners that will do alterations or repairs on clothes but also will do some light shoe repair as well. They won't make you a shoe but can fix a broken heel just like I'm sure there are cobblers out there who are capable of clothing repairs.

Cobblers are very good for doing repairs of anything that requires heavier duty needles and threads.

So, full-text search making full use of every core under the heatsink? ))

When I was a kid there were vastly more shoe repair places than there are now. I guess if we plotted the graph backwards there would be way more several hundreds years ago.

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