I Bet I Know Where You Got Your Shoes
You will hear the line before you see the person delivering it. You will be walking down Bourbon Street or through Jackson Square or along Decatur, minding your own business, and someone will approach with the confidence of a man who has just discovered the meaning of life and cannot wait to share it. "I bet I know where you got your shoes," he will say, grinning. And if you are new to New Orleans, you will make the mistake of engaging.
The answer, of course, is "on your feet, on Bourbon Street" — or whatever street you happen to be standing on. It is a riddle with no wrong answer for the person asking, because the point was never the shoes. The point is the five or ten dollars you are expected to hand over for having been outwitted by a joke that has been running continuously since before you were born. The shoe scam is the granddaddy of New Orleans street hustles, a tradition as old and enduring as the city itself.
The Taxonomy of the Hustle
The shoe scam is just the most famous entry in a rich catalog of New Orleans street-level entrepreneurship. The French Quarter and surrounding tourist corridors are home to an ecosystem of scammers, hustlers, and creative extractors of cash who operate with varying degrees of charm, aggression, and creativity.
There are the bracelet guys, who will tie a friendship bracelet on your wrist before you can decline and then demand payment for their craftsmanship. There are the three-card monte dealers who set up folding tables on side streets, surrounded by accomplices pretending to be winning customers. There are the tap dancers who perform brilliantly and then follow you for three blocks if you do not tip generously enough. And there are the more modern variants — the clipboard people collecting for charities that may or may not exist, the parking lot attendants in lots where no attendant is needed, the guys who will "watch your car" for a fee that is really insurance against what might happen to your car if you do not pay.
The Line Between Hustle and Harm
Most New Orleans scams fall into the category of aggressive panhandling dressed up in theatrical clothing. They are annoying but generally harmless — a tax on naivety that visitors pay once and learn from. The shoe guy is not going to hurt you. He is going to outsmart you, take your money, and move on to the next person, and in a weird way, you might even respect the hustle. It takes a certain kind of confidence to run the same joke on ten thousand people a year and still deliver it like it just occurred to you.
But there are darker corners to the scam world, and tourists especially should be aware. The distraction pickpocket is real. The fake taxi that overcharges by five hundred percent is real. The bar that adds mysterious charges to your tab is real. New Orleans is a city that rewards street smarts and punishes the oblivious, and the scammers know the difference between a local who will laugh them off and a visitor who does not yet understand the rules.
A City of Performers
In a strange way, the scammers are part of the show. New Orleans has always been a city of performers — musicians, dancers, storytellers, preachers, and hustlers — and the line between entertainment and extraction has never been clearly drawn. The best scammers are performers, delivering their lines with timing and charm that would serve them well on any stage. They are pests, absolutely. But they are our pests, and the French Quarter would be a little less interesting without them. Just keep your wallet in your front pocket.
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