Levis are already doing this with their made to measure jeans which are cheaper than ordinary ones. Shoe buyers in the United States can go to the Custom Foot. It measures their feet and can offer any kind of shoe style made to fit for around 150 dollars. After their feet have been measured the buyer can choose from hundreds of styles on the net without going near the shop.

But the system will go further - soon it will be able to use advanced computer science called neural networking to identify the kind of shoes that a person with your shoe buying history and personality profile is going to like and then offer them to you. Neural networking lets the computer test literally millions of hypotheses - such as that dental nurses living in the home counties with cats named Sooty tend to prefer X type shoes. The computer can create an "image community" of people with similar tastes and then judge what type of shoe you will like based on what the others in the group are buying.