With this wide-eyed call to shop ringing in our ears, it took all manner of restraint for me and my friend not to break into an actual sprint through the Summer Place parking lot.

A few days earlier, we'd received the kind of SMS that most women dream about: "Come to the Jimmy Choo and Nina Roche mark-down sale for beautiful, red carpet shoes at unbelievable prices."

Recession, deathly Waterfront sales, no tourists in Cape Town. Whatever the reason, one of the world's most famous shoe brands was having a great big clear-out sale and that's why my friend Paola and I - and about 200 other women - found ourselves crammed into a Johannesburg conference room that had temporarily been transformed into shoe heaven.

I soon realised, though, that much more fun than buying the shoes (the heels were all sky-high and beyond my balancing abilities - sadly, the flats had gone by the time I arrived!) was witnessing the shopping frenzy happening all around me.

In exactly 90 minutes, the women on what surely had to have been one of the most exclusive mailing lists in town had picked clean the tables of shoes lining the walls of this makeshift shop.

Piles of sandals, boots, stilettos and pumps shrank before my eyes as these women carted boxes and boxes of the stuff to the tills.

I reckon that about 800 pairs of shoes flew out of there. It was fascinating. These were not bargain hunters who were jumping at the opportunity to buy a pair of designer shoes because they could never have afforded them otherwise. They were regular, respectable, Jimmy Choo customers, some of whom have been known to fly down to Cape Town to the only Jimmy Choo shop in South Africa to get their fix.

This was simply an opportunity to buy five pairs for the price of one - and, boy, were they taking advantage.

Around the world, the debate about whether expensive designer labels are going to survive the downturn continues.

Current thinking is that they'll still be there, but prices might dip to slightly more realistic levels and labels will all develop a diffusion (read: cheaper) line.

Whatever the analysts decide, I'm convinced women will continue to find a way to buy designer labels, especially beautiful shoes.

And while the recession has hit most, there are still many well-heeled folk in Joburg with money to spend on designer gear.

The Jimmy Choo sale saw the mandatory cat-fight that happens when bargains abound - with two women actually hitting the payment queue each clutching one shoe from a pair.

They were apparently hoping that the wise woman behind the till would find a way of deciding who got to take both shoes home.

It was not pretty.

After some bickering, the one party backed down, saying the shoes now had a bad spirit about them so she didn't want them anyway. The other wordlessly gathered up both shoes, added them to her pile of eight boxes and happily paid for her booty - bad spirit and all!

And at the cappuccino and macaroon station another shopper turned down an offer of a cup of coffee: "I can't have caffeine, there's already so much adrenalin coursing through my veins."

Of course, one could hardly help feeling all this passion and excess without yearning for a way of harnessing it to make a difference to the world.

Could a shoe tax be a start?