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.
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.
>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.
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.
>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.
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.
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)
