Dave Don't Read This (Shoe vs. Snowmobile Spending)

Dave don't read this: My husband, Dave, and I have a long-running financial argument, which goes like this:
Elyssa: "All our money goes to fixing broken snowmobiles."
Dave: "All our money goes to your shoe collection."
Let me state, for the record, that snowmobiles get rolled, crashed into trees and blown up every year, requiring hundreds of dollars for repairs each winter. My shoes sit quietly in the closet, minding their own business and bringing nothing but goodwill and happiness to my feet, home and life. Snowmobiles do none of those things.
You can imagine my dismay, then, when I received what some might consider a solid piece of evidence in Dave's favor.
MapInfo Corporation (www.mapinfo.com) is sending press releases to heaven knows how many people about the counties that spend the most money on women's footwear annually. Guess which county made the No. 1 spot? Utah County.
Yep, according to the press release (which I still have a hard time believing), women in Utah County outspent their counterparts in New York, Chicago, Florida and California on shoes. Utah County took the top spot, followed by Santa Clara, Calif., and San Mateo, Calif.
"While it may be no surprise that Santa Clara and San Mateo counties in sunny California would top the list with the array of sandal and flip flop styles available, who knew that women in the Beehive State of Utah had such a shoe fetish?" asks the press release.
Who knew? My husband, that's who.
According to a publicist for MapInfo, the company "took the aggregate dollars spent in each county on women's footwear between July 2005 and June 2006 and divided it by the number of households in the area. The data ranks average annual spending per household on women's footwear per counties with more than 100,000 households."
There could be a million reasons that Utah County ranked so high, namely that we have a lot of big households that require a lot of shoes. And my personal collection is more Nine West and Steve Madden than Christian Louboutin and Jimmy Choo, so it's not like each shoe is a snowmobile-repair equivalent. Or that I personally am driving up Utah County's average spending.
And did I mention that my shoes have never rolled, crashed into trees or caught on fire? Did I? Did I?
I'm still awaiting the press release on nationwide snowmobile-repair spending.
-- Elyssa Andrus
This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page B1 on Feb. 07, 2007. See http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/209168/149/