Consumer Confidential: Lots o’ shoes, meat-flavored drinks

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Here’s your tie-one-on Tuesday roundup of consumer news from around the Web:

-- The average woman spends $25,000 over the course of a lifetime on shoes. (Note to wife: Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) This startling factoid comes courtesy of a British insurance company, GoCompare.com, which found that aside from that lifetime shoe bill, the average woman has 19 pairs of shoes -- three with heels, six pairs of flip-flops, flats, sandals or wedges, three pairs of boots and four pairs of ‘foxy style.’ The typical woman also boasts two pairs of ‘sensible’ work shoes and two ‘random’ shoe purchases. No survey results on guys, but I’m guessing we’re all pretty uniform in our single pair of work shoes, our single pair of casual shoes and our single pair of sneakers.

--Yes, it’s been a long time coming, but at last the world will have meat-flavored vodka. Aside from this sounding pretty disgusting, the Alaska Distillery in Sarah Palin’s home town of Wasilla has just launched a smoked salmon-flavored vodka. It takes its place on the weird-beverage shelf beside the bacon-flavored vodka from a Seattle distillery. Alaska Distillery says it took 48 tries to get the salmon brew just right, with some early efforts described as ‘greasy.’ I welcome the feedback of vodka imbibers as to how appealing this sounds.

-- David Lazarus