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Comment by nopinsight | Hacker News Reader

It is great there is little objective difference between $800 and $55 pairs of shoes. It means the middle class can afford high-quality items and do not need to care if someone is willing to pay for the brand.

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I also don't really agree. I think it'd be hard to find a high quality pair of leather shoes for $55 that you couldn't pick out of a lineup. But then you might need to know the difference to spot it. Kind of like when you learn what kerning is you see bad kerning everywhere. Cheap shoes (especially leather dressier shoes) are easy to spot by the sole and stitching. I've known a few people in service industry who've said a persons shoe is often a signal of wealth they can leverage.

I’d say that’s not quite what’s going on here. You can’t tell when someone else is wearing an $800 or $55 pair of shoes, but in my experience the $55 shoes tend to bite my heels and fall apart within the year. If you don’t care about the brand and have a middle-class income, I might spend $55 on shoes for a growing kid but $200 on shoes for myself that I know will last for years.

Not saying you can’t get good shoes for $55, just sharing my experience. Someone will come in with the Terry Pratchett quote about boots here any moment, or you can look up the quote for yourself.

I've bought plenty of $300 pairs of shoes that fell apart in a year. Price has little relationship with quality nowadays. You just need to do your research.

What kinds of shoes are you buying for 2-300 $? High quality running shoes seem to max out at ~150 and the prices are centered around 100.

Nike has plenty over $200.

There doesn't seem to be a noticeable difference between their $80 and $240 shoes though.

I can't appreciate any increase in quality as a running shoe price goes over ~140 $. I bet any 200 $ running shoe has an equivalent for about half that price. (which seems to be what you're saying)

When I ran a lot (avg. 20km/workday, more in the weekends), I’d wear down any shoe in a couple of weeks tried all sorts of running shoes in different price ranges but in the end I settled with buying cheap ~$50 shoes since I knew that I had to buy a new pair next month again.

>High quality running shoes seem to max out at ~150

Huh? That's not even remotely accurate. There are tons of Nikes and Adidas way beyond $200, and even more so for "collectible" sneakers, and way more so ($1000 easily) for quality leather shoes.

E.g:

https://www.adidas.com/us/originals-shoes?sort=price-high-to...

https://store.nike.com/us/en_us/pw/mens-shoes/7puZoi3?sortOr...

https://www.colehaan.com/mens-shoes?pmax=351.00&pmin=251.00

https://www.thefryecompany.com/mens/boots?product_list_order...

And I'm not including any high-fashion brands...

It was my mistake to interpret "shoes" as "athletic shoes" even though the example in the first post looked like running shoes. You do not need to spend more than 150 on running shoes. Boots are a different story.

Shoes for aesthetics are beyond my scope.

>It was my mistake to interpret "shoes" as "athletic shoes" even though the example in the first post looked like running shoes. You do not need to spend more than 150 on running shoes.

Well, in my here parts, sneakers (which can easily go in the $200+ and even multi-$Ks for pure aesthetics/vintage) still count as "athletic shoes".

Dress shoes and hiking boots are often in that range. A good $200 pair of dress shoes or hiking boots should last many years, even with constant use, as long as you take care of them. You definitely don’t have to spend $300 but if you’re willing to spend $150 you have a lot of options available.

For sneakers I’m not convinced that spending $200 is worth it. For hiking boots I’m pretty skeptical of anything I see that’s under $200, or maybe $150 on sale.

Sure but boots are a very different animal. I wouldn't call my hiking boots "shoes". I more had the shoe from the original comment in mind (https://www.balenciaga.com/us/triple-s-shoes_cod11271302nb.h...) which looked more like a walking shoe (sneaker) than a running shoe (that heel is massive). But it's definitely not a dress shoe.

I guess my argument wasn’t clear, if that’s your response. Nobody’s saying that “if a shoe costs more, it must be higher quality”. Give me a little credit, I’m not quite that stupid.

Good shoes are expensive, but expensive shoes are not necessarily good.

Thanks to industrial processes, good shoes also have a maximum manufacturing cost. There are only so many features you can pack in to one footwrap designed to be worn on the surface of Earth. Springs, torsion bars, carbon fiber, pneumatic chambers, pockets, separated toes, non-Newtonian fluid insoles, flame resistance, arc reactor exhaust ports, or whatever. All of those things still cost less than the trademark logo.

You can avoid buying some bad shoes by filtering out those with low prices. You can avoid buying shoes with a bad price/quality ratio by filtering out those with high prices. You still need to carefully examine any that are left, because with shoes, quality influences price, but price has many complex factors and you cannot easily determine what fraction is due to the quality.

Yeah this is 100% not the case when it comes to athletic wear. You are far more likely to get a comfortable well fitting shoe made by Nike, Addidas, etc than you are from one of the high end fashion designers. And it's pretty obvious why. At the end of the day your $300 Jordan's need to look good but they also have to be something you can be active in. Ball players you know actually play ball in them. Your $1000 Balenciagas just need to be expensive. The quality of the shoes is directly related to what you do in them. If you are buying trainers to run in, you probably want to replace them yearly if not every 6 months. If you're buying them to walk around in and because they look nice, yeah they'll last a lot longer. People treat their shoes based on the price they paid. You're not doing gardening in your $1000 sneakers but you might in the $50 pair of nikes you picked up at Nordstroms Rack.

If you live in a walkable city and you walk, there's no $800 shoe that would last you proportionately longer than $55 shoe. If you Uber everywhere or drive everywhere then it is quite possible that an $800 shoe would last 4-5 years.

Goodyear welted shoes can be resoled multiple times plus you can also glue a plastic sole over the leather one. The cost is 15$ and when you're wearing it out you simply replace it. Dainite soles are quite more long lasting than leather ones too. Goodyear > Blake > Cement.

Not only the construction matters but also the leather used in the upper. I can differentiate a 200$ shoe from a 500$ one at a glance, a good pair of shoes can be brought back to life even if they have been seriously abused. There are more durable leathers too like cordovan.

In clothing there are many garments where there isn't much of a correlation between price and quality but leather shoes and jackets isn't one.

It is too bad that the reply to this message got [dead]'ed because it contained the typical mistake that people make when talking about "fixing" something - the gist was that for $15 it is possible to replace the sole of a $55 shoe.

Here's the thing:

$55-$200 shoe can be had at TJMaxx or Marshalls for $25. Quality sole replacement is claimed to be $15. That's not really correct - it is closer to $40 in sole + labor + you need another pair of shoes while your shoe is being replaced but lets say that it is $20.

So even if there's no wear on the top of the shoe replacement of a sole would cost $20. Objectively, soles in a city would last ~6-10 months based on daily wear. This means that what we are evaluating is:

Shoe 1: $0 NRC + $25 every 6 months

Shoe 2: $800 NRC + $20 every 6 months

Man it will take a long time to break even on shoe 2

10-15$ is what it costs to glue a rubber sole over the leather one, I believe it's calle a topy in English. It's mainly used so you don't fall in slippery floors but can also be added for durability. A quality sole replacement for a goodyear welted shoe costs around 100$.

You're not buying an 800$ shoe for durability but for aesthetics and comfort. There isn't much difference in durability between a 200$ shoe and an 800$ one. There is a great deal of difference between a 55$ and a 200$ shoe.

I have 200$ shoes with dainite soles that have been worn three or four hundred times over the last 4 years and are completely new.

We can't evaluate how much a sole lasts objectively because we should:

- Specify the sole that is being used.

- The construction of the shoe.

- How the wearer walks.

- How many kms does he walk.

- Where he walks.

- The weather.

- ...

In my experience a dainite sole is perfectly fine after one year of usage. Some of my days have 30-50k steps. I don't wear shoes daily though because it's bad for them and I have 22 pair of shoes.

My reply wasn't stating that an 800$ shoe lasts 14.5 times longer that a 55$ shoe but the notion that a 55$ shoe will last around the same time. A 200$ will last 5 times more easily. An 800$ shoe will look better than a 55$ shoe 30 years later at a cost of a 100$ resole every 5 years. We should take into account the environmental costs of buying new low quality shoes every year instead of having 3 pairs of good value quality shoes (200$) and taking good care of them.

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