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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

I like this suspicion, but I don't buy into anymore. I think there is a floor to quality. However, even what we call cheap quality shoes nowdays are typically above the quality of what you used to be able to get many places, period.

More, if you want shoes to last a long time, I have found nothing beats having multiple sets and not wearing the same shoes constantly. I have not empirically studies this, though. So, if anyone has, I'd be delighted to see the results. I just know that if I buy an expensive set of shoes for me, they last about 6 months if I constantly wear them. I can, of course, resole them. But they are not magically doing better than the cheaper shoes I can also buy. Rotating shoes so that I wear a different set day to day makes a huge difference in how long they last.

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Fair enough, footwear is not the best example nowadays. I went from buying cheap $10 shoes at Walmart to only wearing Marine issue Vibram boots that would cost in excess of $200. Although the special forces boots are silent and more comfortable they only last a couple years. My current pair I've had for 4 years and they look identical to the day I got them. But they're not for everybody. However if we extrapolate away from footwear and think about cars I think the anecdote is more apt. Take for instance something as trivial as an oil change. Regular 5w30 will cost around $30 but it breaks down relatively quickly and needs to be changed if you're lucky every 3k miles. Full synthetic on the other hand will set you back $100 plus and will last at least 7k miles. When you change it you'll find with normal use that the oil hasn't really broken down within that span and you're really just changing it to remove combustion and minor engine particulates. Not to mention the engine with full synthetic will run smoother and more efficient, while the regular oil by nature will run noticeably sluggish when reaching its end of life. All of this is moot when making the choice to go full electric, but how much will that set someone back vs buying a good used car that in the most rare circumstances can hope to get less than a quarter of the life of an electric. An even more relevant example for this community I would think would be the concept of tech debt.

$10 Walmart shoes will ruin your legs though. They are fine if you want to sit in a chair/car all day.

'...cheap quality shoes nowdays are typically above the quality of what you used to be able to get many places, period.'

Cheap quality shoes can be better than premium brand 'quality' shoes these days.

I find that the most cost-effective clothes are usually those that you won’t find at Wal-Mart or K-Mart nor at, for example, Sack’s Off Fifth. $50 dollar Levi’s, $100 Nike running shoes, $10 tee shirts, etc seem to last way longer than the cheapest stuff and the expensive stuff. That said, I recently started learning to sew, and am starting to believe that, for example, a $10 sweatshirt from CVS plus some sewing is much more cost effective than, say, the $50 Adidas option.

Do you have recommended improvements/modifications? Sounds like fun.

I wish, but I still have no idea what I’m doing, so not really. All I’ve repaired so far is a couple pairs of Levi’s that I keep tearing on my desks at school.

I mentioned sweaters from CVS because I bought one for ~$9 and the seams are coming apart after about 8 months, but it seems like it will be easy to fix because it was made in such a simple way.

Just to save you some trouble, if it comes apart on the seams because of age and not because of shoddy sewing from the maker, it's not worth fixing - it will come apart again at a different place within the next month or so. This is especially true for jeans. At least this is my decade-long experience with fixing everything.

Thanks! That's sorta what the woman said at the shop I bought my needle/thread. The sweater is definitely just poor sewing from whatever factory it came from, the jeans a combination.

Given that you have some experience, do you have any resources you can recommend? Maybe a good book with a bunch of the fundamental skills?

Ah, no, I'm sorry. I basically never learned how to do it apart from looking at a few pictures over 15 years ago and talking about it a little (experiences of when to use a patch and when just thread is fine for example). A friend of mine taught me how to use a machine but I find that for repairs it's far better to do things by hand. Most of the things are really easy to figure out with common sense. I bet youtube can help you though. I for myself would rather put my energy into learning how to work with new material, I'm often annoyed by how often old fabric does not hold up and I'm mostly repairing old stuff anyway where a repair does not need to be pretty or long-lived.

Well, if you make any posts on the things you try, I'd be interested in reading. Good luck!

I bought a pair of Frye boots -- ostensibly hand-made and durable, $360 dollar shoes -- which completely disintegrated after a year of walking around New York city and were not actually repairable. My cheapo $60 mall boots, on the other hand, got me through 3 years.

I have found nothing beats having multiple sets and not wearing the same shoes constantly.

This, a thousand times over. Shoe trees also do wonders to extend the life of footwear. It's all about letting the shoe completely dry out between wears.

> I just know that if I buy an expensive set of shoes for me, they last about 6 months if I constantly wear them.

Generally speaking that's true, though I wear the crap out of my Birkenstocks and they still seem good.

I finally got Birkenstocks just because they are apparently bullet proof and comfortable, but after something like 18 months of wearing them non-stop (almost every day), they have completely worn through and are not usable.

After that I had a pair of Walmart flip-flops that lasted only half the time under similar use but they were 1/10th the price.

Before that I had a pair of no-name not flip-flop (i.e., velcro strap) sandals that lasted nearly 6 years of fairly continual use.

There is no particular moral or conclusion here, they are just anecdotes. I just think you can't make any general rule about "it's better to buy quality than cheap" or vice-versa: it's all situation specific and depends on the quantitative costs and lifetimes.

There are many examples of "it's expensive to be poor". There also many examples of where it's not, and how people have what would have been considered a very high standard of living in the past on minimal output. Many not poor people are also definitely not doing the boot anecdote thing posits: they aren't buying one set of boots and wearing them their entire lifetime. They aren't buying one set of hardwood furniture they use from their 20s until they die and they aren't buying a quality vehicle and running it for 20 years on synthetic oil.

So you wear out four pairs in two years?

Easily, for some types of shoes. In dry weather, I don't care. Small holes in the shoes don't really matter much. In wet, though, it is baffling how quickly I can go through shoes.

This was back when I walked about two to five miles a day. Just in the office, the same shoes can last much longer.

For that matter, most of the change has been in the wet season. I wouldn't be surprised to find the shoes flat out wear faster in that environment.

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