Eight Dollars for Sore Feet

ABC's Maeva Bambuck reports from London: It’s 3am, you’ve worked the dance floor all night and your feet are sending distress signals. Your pumps are compressing/turning your toes into a pulp — they’re not called killer heels just for their look – and as you contemplate the way home, your patience evaporates. To your benefit, sore feet can turn any Cinderella into an evil stepsister. All you really need is a slipper that fits. Enter the Rollasoles, the shoes that roll into a ball, and fit into your purse. Since 2008, at the exit of clubs and bars across the UK, Rollasole vending machine offer to put an end to your suffering for $8 (£5) in black, silver, gold or pink and take you to your cab, to your car, or all the way home. A simple solution to a party-girl’s perennial problem.   And it took a man to come up with the idea. Rollasoles emerged from Matt Horan’s brilliant British brain, and more directly, from his basement in Bristol. When he got laid off from his cruise-operating job 18 months ago, he took his redundancy money and designed a pair of slippers that would take ladies home in one piece, or as his website states, “like Prince Charmings, to gently escort you down the stairs, across the kerb, and into the back of your carriage – all without you falling on your face.” “When I went out with my girlfriend it was always a case of carrying her or listening to her complain all the way home,” Horan told ABC News, who wisely identifies sore feet as a problem common to “all women after midnight.” A year on and his Rollasoles have won hearts and feet across the UK and are being hailed by the likes of Perez Hilton.  There are 45 vending machines across the UK, in party-island Ibiza, and in inebriation-homeland Ireland. The next towns on Horan’s map are New York , L.A. and Vegas, and if all goes according to his Cinderella story, Rollasoles should soon be rolling out in a nightclub near you. For this weekend, however, he will be looking after his stall at the Glastonbury Music Festival, where the likes of Kate Moss and Peaches Geldorf will be able to pick their sizes.