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We believe in the capitalist system. We believe that people should be able to make money and
come up with new inventions and sell products. That's all great
and we encourage that.
The problem is you can't sell snake oil.
You can't sell junk
and you can't tell people that their are going to get a benefit from something
when they're not and the reality is that people like
to lose weight
easily
and they want the magic pill pat and they want to take the quick fix diet
and they want to get the thigh master and they want the latest fad and the thing was
this was the latest fad
and if you could wear sneakers and lose weight - Hey! Who doesn't want to lose
weight just by wearing sneakers.
So it was a brilliant marketing idea
and you couple that with the fact that you can wear them at work and not have to do anything else
except wear shoes and lose weight?
That was a nice hook and frankly it worked.
It worked because they sold
a lot of these shoes
and was only until
folks start getting hurt really bad wearing these shoes
that the fraudulent nature of this came to life.
We have a legal mechanism
in this country that lets people get their money back
when they've been defrauded, if you will, for their purchases and so a whole lot of people
get together...
they can ban together in what's called a class action
and in this class action said well you said - Look, you've made a representation. A representation that's not
true
and so we're saying that...
to Skechers... anybody who bought these shoes should be entitled to their money back
and that's what we're trying to do. We
just want to get people their money back.
For a lot of folks, $100 is a lot of money for a sneaker. It sure is a lot of money for
me
so what we're saying is
if you're going to put out a significant amount of money,
for something that doesn't work
you should get your money back
and that's what we're asking for in this class action.
You know, if you take a look at
the box
it says right here: "Designed to help
burn more calories, tone muscles, improve posture."
In a nutshell, those are all lies.
They do no more than any other sneaker does
when you wear a sneaker when you work out.
There's nothing particularly beneficial about these shoes
and the benefits that they counter...
cardiovascular benefits and benefits to
weight loss, benefits to
your heart... everything
that could possibly be wrong with you,
they promote these shoes as fixing. Okay, so people are saying "Okay, well why don't I work out while I go to work. Why don't I work out while I'm serving food. Why don't I work out
while I'm helping patients like nurses. And so
people are buying these things, relying on these representations with
expectations that their
going to get an improvement or benefit
that they wouldn't get if it
were some other shoe.
So now two things are happening. Number one, they don't get any of those benefits and
number two,
lots of people are getting hurt. So when
you make a claim
in this country,
when you advertise something, there has to be a good-faith basis to that claim.
You can't just make stuff up
and in fact that exactly what Skechers did.
So what we're saying to people is "Look folks,
you bought shoes.
You're not getting the benefits that they told you you're going to get so you know
what?
Get your money back.
Get your money back because you bought something that's not working for you. It's not working for anybody."
When you look at the shoes, you can see that, unlike ordinary shoes that are flat,
these things rock.
And they rock for a reason. They rock because they want to make your walk
unstable
so that you purposely have to move forward or lean back and tighten your
muscles
in order to keep your balance. Now that may be good if you're working out for 20 minutes or 30 minutes
you want to
give your muscles
some tone and some pressure
but they're not meant to be more worn 24-hours a day and your muscles aren't meant to be
pulled and contracted
in different ways 24-hours a day. Look,
when you change the way you walk and you change the way you stand, that puts
unnecessary pressure on your joints and on your muscles and on your tendons.
And injuries are happening all over the place.
I think these are the most dangerous consumer products ever made
and it's
being borne out by the consumer product safety commission
which shows that this is the number one reported product
causing injuries last year. Of all products reported, this is the worst.
The reality is that ninety percent of our clients are women
and I think that the marketing was designed
particularly at women to make them feel somehow inadequate. They weren't pretty enough,
they're not thin enough.
That they're not trim enough.
And, you know, here's your magic bullet
and "here you go women, we're going to make you the beauty queen that
all the magazines say you need to be."
Unfortunately, for a lot of folks
it was pretty effective advertising.
Kim Kardashian and Joe Montana and Wayne Gretzky and a whole lot of other folks
are talking about it.
"Wear these shoes and
you're going to be looking great."
And who doesn't want to look great?
These shoes are interesting because they
present two types of problems. One, as you can tell, is that
their unstable
just as there are so people lose their balance just from the instability
but what also happens internal to the shoe is that your foot
turns inward
and when that happens and you walk
if you lose your balance... you lose it and your legs snap
even before you fall and the tibia and the fibula and where they all meet together and join in
the ankle area
they snap and we have
hundreds of finds where that is happening.
It's a horrific, painful injury where people spend weeks, months, if not years recovering
recovering from these injuries.
Right now what we're asking people to do is hold on to their shoes and more importantly, hold on to their
receipts.
If they don't have their receipts they need to go to the store and find out what it takes
to get their receipt. If they paid cash
maybe there's some sort of log that the store keeps...
some sort of book keeping that the store keeps. If they have their old credit card receipts, they need to find them.
if they don't have them, they need to contact their credit card company.
They need to do whatever they can to show proof of purchase because
having the shoe
may or may not do it. It depends. That hasn't been
determined yet.
Everybody should keep abreast of what's going on with the lawsuit
and we've set up a couple websites where they can do that.
Certainly our firms website www.myadvocates.com
we're always posting new information about this particular
lawsuit and everything that our firm is doing.
Also on Facebook there are a number of sites they can look at where we keep
people updated
with current information about
toning shoes generally and the lawsuit in particular.
We want to answer your questions.
Contact us
at
1-877-MYADVOCATES
or
visit us
at myadvocates.com