World’s Worst Ad?

David Michael Newstead | The Philosophy of Shaving

The history of advertising has included many unfortunate chapters. One example of this is this newspaper ad from a Washington DC shoe store from January 1918. At the height of the First World War, Everybody’s Shoe Store bragged how it “mowes down high prices,” featuring the then recently invented tank. This find is another example of me researching something totally unrelated in old newspapers, then stumbling across a bizarre ad that is so strange you initially think you imagined it. Regrettably, I didn’t. As an epilogue, no other ads for the store were like this and it appears to have shuttered around 1929.