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Comment by veidr | Hacker News Reader

Yes, the overwhelming majority of Americans in the USA do wear shoes in the house. I myself did it too, until age 19 (when I moved to Japan).

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Consumer/story?id=5177409

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/18ekqf/as_a_canad...

http://www.quora.com/Do-real-Americans-wear-shoes-indoors-as...

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20101011193926A...

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It is actually a really strange thing. There seems to be pockets of people in various countries that either wear shoes inside or not but can't imagine doing the opposite and assumes everybody in their city/state/country is like them.

Interesting point: You also never see people on TV shows and movies taking their shoes off when they go to a house but I imagine this might be mainly due to the show not wanting to break up the action.

Immediately thought of Mr Rogers[0][1].

[0] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Rogers%27_Neighborhood...

[1] http://photomatt7.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/mr-rogers-was-a-g...

The question is: do you often see people taking their shoes off when they go to a house on Japanese TV shows and movies?

Yes, you do. It would be weird enough not to that it would jar the suspension of disbelief.

In Greek shows, everyone wears their shoes in the house, even though nobody in Greece actually does. We've accepted it as "one of the things they do on TV", but every Greek home has a bunch of slippers you can wear near the door.

That is amazing to me. In Minneapolis, everyone requires you to remove shoes before entering the house proper. Maybe it's the snow ... of which we are currently in the process of getting about 12" tonight :-/

Yeah, grew up in Minneapolis and most everyone removes their shoes, especially during the winter as it would create a complete mess if you didn't.

During the rest of the year, it depends a little bit on the residence. I never cared if someone kept their shoes on in the junky apartments I lived in during college, but if it were my parent's well-kept house for example, I'd consider it rude to keep them on.

Ditto. Even though I'm renting I have two runners so that I can absolutely cover the floor from the door to the coat closet. The boots (and shoes) don't leave the rug.

One of my friends has such high carpet and a close to the floor door that they can't have a rug immediately inside their unit. They contrived a mini parkour course to safely enter. You'd have to hop from the common hallway to a rug 2ft in and then to another one 2ft further, all in the name of etiquette and not wearing shoes "inside".

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