That reminds me of an incident on Holland America Cruise Line. A number of years ago, for economic reasons, the company replaced the servers, who had been Dutch, in the ships' dining rooms, with Indonesians. The problem with that was that many of the Indonesians had never worn shoes before, which they now had to wear. One of the Indonesian servers found his new shoes so uncomfortable, that he took them off, and to hide the fact that he was not wearing shoes, he actually painted both his feet with black shoe polish. It did not work, and he was forced to put his shoes back on.