Nowadays it is hard to buy good shoes and also to find a tailor. If in the first case the reason is high prices, in the second case there is another reason. There are few people in Armenia now who can repair shoes well. Before, there were factories and some places where people could learn how to repair shoes and practice. But now they can only learn this from private persons who are not experienced in this field. In case you have a good shoe-maker relative you can learn this profession, but if you don’t have any, your clients may complain later. Generally Armenian shoe-makers say that there are no more good specialists here. We talked to Arman Ajvazyan. He is 30 years old. He repairs shoes in Armenia. He has learnt his profession in Russia. “All good shoe-makers have left for Moscow”, – said Arman. It is more profitable to repair shoes than to make new shoes. “If I make shoes I will have about 2.000 dram profit from each pair, which is less than the money I get from repairing. So it is better for me to repair shoes than to make new ones”, -said Arman. This is better for him because he doesn’t have trouble with selling shoes or other kinds of procedures.
We talked to another person (Sergey Simonyan) who repairs shoes too. He thinks that the most important thing is for them to know how to do the job. “If clients bring a model of shoes that you don’t know, you must at least know something about those models in order to understand what is wrong there”, -said Sergey. It is not easy for them to correct everything in a duly manner also because of the fact that there are not enough materials at their work place. We visited several kinds of places and learnt that only a few shoe-makers have good tools, the other ones try to find other solutions in concrete cases. But the prices don’t differ much. They put the blame on the materials in case when the clients are not satisfied. “90 % of shoe materials in the market is brought from Turkey. These materials don’t have good quality”, -said Sergey. Of course they can’t use expensive materials in their work because of the price. This work is seasonal. “We almost don’t earn money in summer. They bring slippers to repair and we can’t ask much money for that work”, -said Sergey.
These kinds of activities are considered as private enterprises. But as they don’t know anything about this we can say that they just found a place and started to work there. These people sometimes pay some money to local government officers to let them work in those boutiques. Those people who know what this expression means have made a contract with the local government. “We pay 25.000 dram every year as tax for land. We also pay other payments, including income tax, payments for scavenging and electricity”, – they said. We couldn’t find out anything about their annual income from anyone. Mostly these boutiques were located not far from buildings. “When the local government prohibited trading in streets and on pavements they made us leave our boutiques that were close to streets. Now we are behind the buildings. Very few people know our place. Besides that you need to pay money to locate your boutique in a good place”, -said a shoe-maker, whose boutique was located on Tumanyan street.