/ Blog / / Blog /The United States is generally a shoes-on country. Americans walk around in their homes with their shoes on. You might take off your shoes for comfort when you sit on the couch or at your desk. This is not to say many people don’t take their shoes off at the door, but It’s definitely not everyone.
However, now I live in a shoes-off country. My apartment opens to a little space that’s just about a shoe-height lower than the rest of the floor. Everyone else’s home has one too. Everyone takes off their shoes and keeps them here because it’s cleaner. Your floors don’t get dirty from outside debris. That’s fine with me.
Except for one thing: my floors have about 0% chance of being clean for more than a couple of hours because I have a cat. There’s hair, litter, or even an occasional hairball that will materialize. It’s required that I’m always vacuuming and wiping down my floor. But it also means I’ve come to terms with the fact that my floor is never as clean as I’d like.
One of the frequent examples people give for taking your shoes off is that your shoes undoubtedly have fecal matter on them. I’m going to be honest with you here: cats poop. And they sit on the floor. I want someone who cares a lot about removing shoes at the door to address that one day.
When I think about what things my shoes will track inside versus the things that make my indoor floor dirty anyway, it seems like a negligible difference. If it’s not clear, I still take off my shoes, but I’m not religious about it.
What surprises me is how little this practice extends to other spaces. For all the care that people communicate they have about how clean floors are when you remove shoes, it rarely happens elsewhere. Besides homes, hospitals, and the occasional temple, I haven’t noticed many other situations where everyone’s taking their shoes off.
Everyone wears shoes in restaurants and cafés, except for rare situations where you might dine in a Japanese-style room. Shoes aren’t removed at shops or convenience stores.
Is the implication that these places are just filthy? Because undoubtedly, they’re cleaning their floors every day. But I don’t think people who remove their shoes are cleaning their floors that frequently. Unless they have pets.
For years, people who have grown up in shoes-off countries or shoes-off homes have chided me for wearing shoes in the house (before I moved to Japan), but no one has ever explained how little it actually seems to matter when you have a pet.
In the end, is it even a meaningful distinction?