The old soft shoe.

Converse's 77-year-old basketball shoe keeps 'em jumping in Lumberton. But will Mexico steal the ball?

Converse plant engineer John Gniadek shows off varieties of canvas Chuck Taylor All Stars as if they're his grandchildren: "We got the Batman and Robin shoe. Here's the Christmas shoe with the bell on the back. Here's our skateboard shoe. Here's our shoe with the Chicago Bulls logo. We also do shoes for the Celtics. Any color and just about any style you want, we got it." A transplanted Yankee with a barrel chest and thick Massachusetts accent, Gniadek constantly jokes with employees as he makes his way around Converse's 347,000-square-foot plant in Lumberton. "Fifteen hundred people work here. We stitch 47,000 pairs of Chuck Taylors every day -- 37,000 here and another 10,000 at our plant in Mexico, and we still can't make enough of them. I've never seen anything like it."

Even after 32 years in the shoe business, Gniadek seems awed by the All Star's popularity. Chuck Taylor, a forward with the Akron Firestones and Buffalo Germans, designed the basketball shoe in 1917, and for more than 50 years it was the standard by which the competition was measured, the Air Jordan of its day. But it's a wonder the All Star is still around after the way Nike has hammered Converse over the past two decades.

Combining the latest in shoe technology with cheap overseas labor and innovative marketing, Beaverton, Ore.-based Nike has become the driving force in athletic shoes. University of North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith signed a $1.7 million, four-year contract with Nike last year after having endorsed Converse shoes for most of his 32-year career at Carolina. Smith has said he will give away his Nike salary to assistant coaches, office staff and a scholarship fund. These days, Nike and Stoughton, Mass.-based Reebok dominate the performance-shoe business, while smaller companies such as Converse, LA Gear, Keds and Fila fight over the scraps. In 1993, Converse ranked fifth with $265 million in domestic sales and a 4.24% market share. Internationally, it ranks seventh with $410 million in sales in 1992.

But as Converse was getting slam-dunked in the athletic-shoe business, its funny sneaker with the rubber toe, no ankle support and little padding was quietly becoming an anti-fashion statement for grunge rockers, neo-bohemians on college campuses and Europeans and Japanese. Consumers overseas now buy half of the 10 million-plus pairs of "Chucks" that Converse has sold annually the past three years. The All Star now sells so quickly that Converse's Lumberton plant has been running second shifts and often working Saturdays. Overall, Converse's U.S. sales jumped 23% last year.

How did Converse do it? "They completely changed the way they market the shoe," says Rich Wilner, athletics editor for Footwear News, a trade publication. "A few years back they introduced all sorts of different colors and patterns. They took the All Star out of their performance-shoe catalog and developed it into a fashion line. They even had their sales people insist that retailers display the shoe away from athletic shoes. They really push the American-made angle overseas. It was a complete makeover."

Converse's success with the All Star started in the late 1980s at a time when the company needed some good news. Family-owned in Massachusetts until New York-based Eltra Corp. purchased it in 1972, Converse was sold in 1986 to Interco, a St. Louis-based conglomerate best known in North Carolina for its purchase of Lenoir-based Broyhill Furniture Industries in 1980. In 1988, Interco underwent a leveraged buyout to fend off a hostile takeover. The debt proved excessive, forcing it into bankruptcy in January 1991. Seventeen months later, a reorganized Interco was reborn, comprised of Converse and Florsheim shoes and Lane and Broyhill furniture.

With the furniture industry mired in a slump, Interco has come to depend upon Converse's success, much of it based on the All Star. Chucks represent about a third of Converse's total sales, despite their $30-a-pair price, which is considerably less than its line of performance athletic shoes sell for.

Converse's biggest problem is that it can't make the shoes fast enough at its Lumberton plant, which was leased from B.F. Goodrich Co. in 1972 and purchased a decade later. Late last year, the company announced plans to build a 56,000-square-foot factory in Mission, Texas, just across the border from its stitching plant in Reynosa, Mexico. By next year, the Texas plant will boost All Star production by 3.6 million pairs a year and add 300 to the Converse payroll. The Mexican plant produces the canvas part of the Chuck (the "upper") for the North Carolina operation, which processes rubber soles, attaches them to uppers stitched in both Mexico and Lumberton and packs them for shipping from its distribution center in Charlotte.

The Texas plant gives Converse an operation that's still in the United States but as close as possible to Mexico. Transportation delays and costs will be cut significantly.

Now maybe you're thinking this is sounding like an anecdote for a Ross Perot speech: a successful manufacturer trying to stay competitive in a post-NAFTA/GATT world goes South, possibly leaving a poor North Carolina community -- in this case, Robeson County -- high and dry.

Well, there's a kernel of truth in that, but things are a bit more complicated. Converse's main competition comes from Asia, where most of its rivals make their shoes, so the pressure on costs is intense. "Last year, imports represented 81% of the sales of nonrubber footwear, the category that the All Star is in," says Jim Ostroff, who covers international trade in Washington, D.C., for Fairchild Publications, publisher of Footwear News.

Hence, Mexican labor costs are a big advantage for Converse, though President Gib Ford won't disclose the advantage over Lumberton's costs. "I couldn't tell you," he says innocently. After a long pause, he adds, "It's significantly lower, of course."

Ford hedges again when asked about wages Converse will pay at its new Texas plant: "We haven't figured |the Texas wage package~ out yet. It will be lower" than Lumberton. An article from The Monitor, a Rio Grande Valley newspaper, quoted a Converse official as saying wages would average about $5 an hour. (Converse included the story in a press packet.)

In contrast, plant engineer Gniadek says that employees in Lumberton make $8 to $12 an hour and that benefits, taxes and all the rest will cost Converse about 20% to 30% less in Texas. And he points out that Converse's North Carolina employees are an experienced -- and more expensive -- labor force: About a third of Converse's Lumberton workers have been on the job for more than 20 years. Converse officials insist they remain committed to the Lumberton operation, Robeson County's largest employer. When Ford announced Converse's expansion plans, they point out, he did it in Lumberton to send a message to his North Carolina employees: Your jobs are safe. Converse plans to spend $6.5 million over the next few years to upgrade and maintain the Lumberton plant.

"I don't think our Lumberton employees have much to worry about," Ford says. "If we keep our costs down and continue to aggressively market the shoe, we'll continue to grow. We could sell the shoes that the Mission plant is going to make right now if we had them."

But what happens if Chucks become less popular with U.S. hipsters and their wannabes overseas? Conventional wisdom says that if sales slump, the first job lost will be at the Lumberton plant. After all, the wages in North Carolina are higher than those in Texas and Mexico.

Converse's vice president for manufacturing, Garnett Elliott, sits in his Lumberton office next to the size 24 All Stars that decorate his desk. Conventional wisdom, he says, is wrong for a number of reasons.

First, there is the company's investment in Lumberton. "The infrastructure to support the new Texas plant is sitting in North Carolina," he says. "We have a vast rubber-chemical processing operation here to produce soles for shoes stitched in all three of our facilities. The new plant has none of that."

Second, Converse depends on its Lumberton employees to produce Chucks that are in tune with the latest fad, be it the red, white and blue "stars-and-bars" shoe that Converse made a few years back or the Batman shoe. Typically, shoes manufactured in Asia take five months to reach the consumer, while Converse's Lumberton team can have the newest Chucks in stores in nine weeks.

Before deciding on the Texas plant, Converse considered expanding in North Carolina, officials add. Capital costs were comparable, but growing in Lumberton would have required a third shift. A test of a late-night crew resulted in less efficiency and lower-quality shoes, Ford says. "It was an indicator that we needed a new facility somewhere else."

Elliott thinks the problem with the third shift was part of a larger trend in Robeson County: Finding quality workers who will accept low wages has become increasingly difficult. "One of the problems we've encountered in the community is that the labor market here is strained," he says. "We didn't feel that we would be able to find the people we needed."

Statistics bear him out. The county's November 1993 unemployment rate of 6.5% compares with a peak of 15.2% in the early '80s.

Hunter Poole, economic-development director for Robeson County, agrees with Elliott that the local labor market is less dependent on textile-oriented jobs, which typically pay less and have less-predictable production schedules than most manufacturing jobs. "The labor force is much more inclined to stay with someone who can offer them a check 12 months a year," Poole says. "After all, they have bills 12 months a year."

Over the past six years, Robeson County employers have invested $125 million in new and expanded plant operations. Campbell's Soup, Rocco Poultry, Jasper Textiles, L.K. Southern, International Jensen and Fleetwood Homes are among the county's manufacturers. "We make soup, sinks, speakers, shoes and poultry here. We got a lot of textiles, but we got a lot of everything else, too," Poole says. As for Converse's decision to expand off his turf, Poole allows himself a c'est la vie attitude that comes with knowing the All Star isn't the only game in town anymore. "It's nothing to be ashamed of. Our kids grow up, and they leave home," he says. But Ford insists Converse isn't leaving town as much as buying a vacation home where it's a little warmer and a little cheaper. So long as the All Star is made in the United States, it will be made in Lumberton, he says. And the All Star, the shoe of Bob Cousy and Bill Russell, the classic look that says America to so many foreign buyers, will always be made in the States, right?

"The All Star has to be assembled in the United States," Elliott says. "Obviously, if cost was the only issue, it would be different story."

But cost isn't the only issue. Converse doesn't think foreign-made Chucks would sell. "Consumers won't buy a Chuck Taylor All Star that's not made in the U.S.A." Ford says.

To counteract the brutally fickle fashion industry, Converse is remaking the shoe every season with different colors and fabrics. The All Star lineup for this spring includes Chucks in a variety of colors, with racing stripes, in suedes, plaids and crushed velvets. There are even plans for Chucks with high heels.

Ford is confident that Converse's destiny is in its own hands, so long as it can keep cranking out shoes that raise eyebrows and inspire consumers. "You gotta have sizzle every season," he says. "If we do that, we should be able to compete with anyone."

Robert Lamme is a Fayetteville free-lance writer.