Do Croc Shoes let People Down on Escalators?

Sometimes, if you're the designer of a product and you can't think of a way to make something particularly stylish, you decide to go the opposite way - you try to make something that's clunky and homely-looking, but that kind of flaunts its unattractiveness. If you're lucky, like the Croc shoes you see everywhere these days on kids’ feet, you get a runaway hit. Croc shoes are about protecting your feet - about footwear that are friendly, cheap and safe. Well, that's not what the professional medical magazine injury prevention feels about these lurid looking foam clogs anymore.

Apparently, Croc shoes and escalators don't mix. Crocs are designed with a special nonslip construction; and apparently, this safety feature is what is causing a great many accidents involving children and escalators. In dozens of cases, children wearing crocs often find their shoes getting caught on an escalator step. There are so many of these accidents happening these days to children wearing Croc shoes, there is an entire blog dedicated to it called CrocsAccidents.

Of course, the makers of Cshoes feel that the problem is not with their product but with escalators. They feel escalators have for quite a while now been implicated in injuring children. They feel that the children who've had those accidents would have half them even without Croc shoes. It's just that the shoes are so popular, that any time anything happens that involves them, people like to drag them into the picture. There are tens of millions of crocs worn around the world. There seems no reason to believe that escalators, that have always been involved in accidents that come out of design flaws, should have a special thing for croc shoes. People have been getting their shoelaces caught in escalators forever.

Estimates place it at 25,000 American children under 18: that's how many are injured on escalators every 10 years or so. And that's not including accidents involving strollers. The only way to prevent footwear related injuries on escalators would be for parents to always keep a close eye on their children. Of all the accidents that occur on escalators every year, about 20% are from things like children's clothing and shoelaces getting caught between a step in the wall of the escalator. And these are usually far more dangerous than merely slipping and rolling down an escalator. Whenever you take a child on an escalator, make sure that you keep the child at the center of the escalator and not leaning over one side. You need to keep your child away from the dangerous parts of the machine.