Jen and I seem to have the innate ability to arrive at a store at any time of the day, and stay so long that we eventually get physically removed from the store because it needs to close, and why are you both shirtless in the dress section?

What?  When you don’t have time to get a dressing room, you make due with what you have.

And that is how you start a story with the ending.

After a particularly bad day at work, like two wound-up bulls headed towards a Valentino boutique – get out of my way, I need the illusion of luxurious consumption.

I, of course, can’t enjoy the Cher Horowitz Program treatment of “go to Rodeo [Drive]” nor can I stroll down to Saks and buy myself a new pair of Marni heels, like Blair Forever Charge Card Waldorf.  My version of caution-to-the-wind, wild & free shopping sprees? Ross, baby.

Ross is the puddle of chocolate syrup at the bottom of your mocha.  You go into the store knowing that you don’t have a lot of spending money… but it’s totally okay because you can still probably afford just about everything in the store, and that stuff is going to be just as indulgent as something expensive.

Ross had tasked us with finding the perfect spring-to-summer sandals in one of their stores, and armed us each with a $25 gift card to hunt & gather our options.  Within moments of our arrival, we’d amassed a pile of “maybes” so large it took up the whole bench.  Even more intense: all of those shoes are under $30.  Yeah.  Collecting them was the hard part.  (And you know you’re in a good situation when shopping for shoes is the hard part.)

I couldn’t help but notice how beautifully Jen’s green tea latte complimented these gorgeous yellow espadrilles.  In fact, she carried these puppies around the shoe section for a good 15 minutes, like a safety blanket.  Once she tried them on, I couldn’t blame her for being so enamored.

Right?  And they make Jen’s legs look 5,000 miles long which is pretty spectacular given she’s 5’1″.

Jen was instantly sold on these… blue and pink leopard print flats…?

No, but seriously… these looked amazing on feet, despite the textual description.  I mean, leopard flats are classic, right? Spin on a… classic…? Whatever.  I wanted them, too.  Something about them was eerily hypnotic…

We also got pretty obsessed with the comfort aspect of these green, canvas wedges:

Then things took a turn for the bondage.

…all that stuff under $30! Insane, right? Well, it gets worse: this was just Jen’s first round! We each had two rounds of shoe-trying-on, and everything we tried on, loved, didn’t love – under $30.  It was intense.

Round two begins…

We both had semi-scene-making fits about these perfect, neutral wedges.  I mean, could you possibly have designed a shoe that was more basic but versatile and timeless?  Jen’s dancer feet and my super-jock feet were both slightly too wide to make it work but it was almost worth the pain just because they’re so beautiful! AND YES, LESS THAN $30.

Eventually, Jen had to take over Instagram-ing duties (PS – we’re @themissile and @jennifernation if you want to be Insta-buddies!) so I could put my feet into these glorious, striped wedges.  So comfortable.  I loved the pattern, and I’m usually scared of patterned shoes!  Plus, they were less than $18, so there was that instant yearning for them, also.

Here I am ogling myself:

(No, they’re not selling Doc Martens at Ross – those are mine.  Sorry to be a Debbie Downer.)

I would also like to take this opportunity to tell you that side-zip skinny jeans are the most flattering jeans to wear with heels forever.  Every shoe I put on my feet looked like a Wet Seal ad.  (In a good way if there is one.)  It just looked badass, okay?

Who doesn’t want to feel like Bad Girl Sandra D. every once in a while?  These were the perfect compliment to my jeans style.

How do you like these?  I mean, they’re orange and grey and cork and patent leather… but I really liked them!  They were pretty comfortable, despite the immediate “GAH! Who wants to walk in those?!” reaction, and I didn’t mind the bright colors next to super neutrals.  Thoughts?

As for finding sandals…

Um, obviously, it’s extremely possible for less than $25.  We were there for 3 hours and didn’t leave the shoe section once – we were both extremely impressed at the vast selection of brand and styles at such ridiculously good, Ross-style prices.

As for the experience…

We do have a beef.  We agreed that we would shop for shoes at Ross more often if we could… walk in them?  I tried to get Jen to take video of the strange, Birds-of-Paradise-esque dance that we had to do to view the shoes on our body, in the mirror.  Each pair has the toes bound together by either a wire or cord, and it makes it virtually impossible to take a step that’s larger than about four inches.  So, for the record, we could not try walking in any of these shoes – we could only really see how they felt while we were standing on them – which is noteworthy, but certainly isn’t 100% of the shoe-selection process.  Frustrating?  Yes.  Does it prevent me from trying on 16 pairs of shoes there, buying some, and continuing to shop there?  No.  This is just our $0.02…  Wait, would it be $0.04?  Or still just $0.02 because our thoughts are the same thoughts?  It’s our “pennies totaling an appropriate amount.”

Have you bought shoes at Ross before? What was your experience?

Probably watching Netflix.