Sometimes I suspect that bare feet make pretty good scumbag detectors. There is often a certain suspicious mindset and lack of broadmindedness that they invoke.
And in my experience, that applies to buying a car.
I have to stress that these are my experiences, and maybe cannot be generalized. As with anything dealing with cars, your mileage may vary.
I’ve had experience buying 4 cars while barefoot.
The first was a car for my wife. The dealership never mention the fact that I was barefoot. It simply didn’t matter. On the other hand, it was her car, and she did the test driving.
The second was quite a bit different. This was my daughter’s first car, and she was looking for a fairly inexpensive but serviceable used one. She’d carefully run through internet ads and found one she wanted to look at.
So we went to look at it.
You could tell right away that the salesperson wasn’t the sharpest tack in the box. And then it came to a test drive.
First, they wouldn’t let my daughter drive the car, since she was under 25. And then they said that I couldn’t drive it because I was barefoot, and we all know that driving barefoot is illegal.
This was not only the salesperson, but the entire sales office saying this. They also wouldn’t believe me, nor would they look it up.
Of course, my daughter was mortified. “Dad!”
But about that time we also discovered that they had “accidentally” mislabeled the car, and wanted an extra $1,000 for it (despite what their advertisement said).
That made it very easy to walk away. And a score for the scumbag detector.
My daughter instead bought her car (still running) somewhere else. Somewhere else that didn’t care about my bare feet, and also let her test drive the car herself. You know, somewhere else that was reputable.
But my best experience was when I bought my latest Subaru. In January. A perfectly comfortable January, as far as I was concerned.
I bought the car at the same place I’d bought my previous Subaru, 10 years earlier (though back then I was a little less bold and wore flip-flops). But this time I didn’t bother, and it made no difference.
They did ask me about my bare feet. But it was clear that it was because they were curious. I don’t mind curiosity; I mind idiocy.
Test drive? They didn’t even want to photocopy my driver’s license first. “Here. Take it out.”
It was an easy sale.
For that sort of money, why would anybody make it hard to buy, like that other place did? But if a car dealership really is interested in attracting customers, that shows through in their attitudes.
Even their attitudes to customers who are barefooted.
Ahcuah 
Yeah, when I was buying my challenger back in December of last year. The sales people didn’t believe I was serious cus I was barefoot and wearing shorts and a t-shirt. They probably thought I was a bum off the street. I got to test drive it barefoot, no problem. I got it a week later, payed cash for it. I hope they learned not to profile people.
What is that about being under 25 years of age? I thought you Americans get your driver’s license at 16.
(In Russia, you must be 16 to drive a motorcycle and 18 to drive a car)
Yes, you can drive at 16 (though it varies by state). However, car dealers might have their own policy about what age they will let people take a test drive (and it appears the shadier ones, being less trustworthy themselves, are less likely to trust other drivers). It is also the case that, for single people, 25 is a magic age for insurance rates to drop. It is also nearly impossible for a driver under age 25 to rent a car.
And 40 years ago it would have been a middle aged suit wearing father wearing polished dress shoes with his barefoot college age daughter who refuses to put on shoes and just won’t listen….LOL
I’ll admit I prefer walking around the house and yard barefoot. I also like to drive sans shoes, especially in the summer. But I never thought of test driving a car barefoot. This made me laugh and I just might try it next time around.