Nikes are bar none the worst shoes people try to have me repair. They are made from shitty criminally overpriced plastic and foam that decomposes and falls apart in the box let alone after someone wears them
What shoes do you recommend? Looking to get a new pair soon.
From my point of view athletic shoes aren’t really a thing that can be effectively repaired because even the nice ones use plastics that aren’t easy to work with after they’ve been worn. I can usually do something but its sentiment that keeps them going not quality. But really the lesson I try to teach people is to not give a fuck about the name on the shoe. It vastly more important to know how a shoe is supposed to fit on your foot and that it feels comfortable long term.
Edit: I will add a few names to avoid pretty much entirely though. Post-1988 Cole Haan (owned by Nike), Louis Vuitton and Ecco
To elaborate on the “go for the fit, not the name”, there’s a common belief that shoes need some time to break in before they feel comfortable. This is only true if you get shoes that don’t really fit your foot. There’s more to feet variations than just the length. I learned that the first time I got lucky and one of the few shoes I was trying on in my mad dash to get shoes and go do something else asap fit my foot properly. It immediately made me realize that I need patience when getting shoes and to never buy a shoe that doesn’t feel great right away.
If you’re going for a designer shoe, I bet the odds of it perfectly fitting your foot are low, unless maybe you have the same foot type as Michael Jordan or whichever athlete’s name they are putting on the shoe, assuming that athlete’s foot was even part of the design at all. For all we know, they rip those shoes off as soon as the cameras aren’t watching because it was purely a marketing thing.
Why Ecco? I’ve been wearing the same pair of sneakers by them for a decade now and they’re still holding up well. Have they gotten worse in recent times?
The ones I see coming into the shop are usually about a year or two old and the soles are turning into a sticky powder-like consistency. That in and of itself isnt the problem but because the uppers are attached to the insole by a thin very exposed thread that has been melted into the now crumbling sole I can’t remove enough of the old material to get any suitable adhesives to stick without cutting that structurally fundamental stitch.
The sneakers might hold up better but must just not hold up well enough for folks to bring them to me
Good to know. I have a pair I bought early this year and have been wearing them almost daily. If they come apart in that time frame, that’s gonna suck, because they weren’t cheap.
The quality of the man-made materials has diminished. People have complained that the plastics literally flake off and crack after about 6 months of wear and tear. The stitching is pretty weak, too.
Source: Sneakerhead friend.
Disappointing to hear. They’ve been my go-to for years. I have a pair I bought this year and wear almost daily.
The chemicals that went into making plastics and related polymeric materials last longer and be more flexible were found to be horrible for people and the environment. Basically a long list of cancer causing forever chems.
I have a pair of redwings I’ve had repaired 3x over the last 14 years. They’re expensive, but worth adding to the list.
No one is cross shopping Nike sneakers and red wing boots. That’s apples to oranges.
Lemmy try not to give incredibly out of touch fashion advice challenge: impossible
About once every few weeks, I’ll go visit my local blacksmith and he’ll nail a new pair of pair of shoes right on to my giant toenail. Or maybe he repairs the old ones. I’m not too sure, he doesn’t really tell me much. He just stands in places that make it really hard to kick him, and I only really wanted to do that the first time because I thought he was trying to steal my feet.
Sir, this is not a place for horses.
Correct. One product is meant to be sold, and one is meant to be worn.
I wouldn’t expect any sneaker to be repairable. I switched to OnCloud and love them, Hoka is another solid brand.
For repairable shoes, leather Goodyear welt is where to start. Best entry level brand is Thursday Boot company, but Redwing is super popular too.
Seconding Thursday boots; I love the fit and style. I wanted a leather daily driver I wouldn’t feel too bad about getting some damage on. Hurt a lot for awhile, but no regrets obviously.
If you’re talking about easily available running shoes, there are still select New Balances that are union made in the US (as of a couple of years ago).
If you’re looking for just sneakers, there are a ton made in Europe you can get shipped to north america! I have Vegas at the moment
Oof. Missed this. Thanks, good to know!
At least when it comes to running shoes, I’m of the opinion that the shoe chooses you. Go to a running store and try on a few brands, find the one that feels the best. Buy one pair from that store; every subsequent time you buy running shoes you know the band and model and can buy it wherever is cheaper.
I don’t repair shoes, but I work in a place that sells them and I know exactly what you mean. They’re shit. Adidas are the better of the big 2 brands.
How does Puma rate in comparison?
Pumas last forever in my experience.
I also like to get them over Adidas since that was the one of the two brothers who was not a literal Nazi
IMO Puma do the best quality gear out of the major sportswear brands, and they’re usually amongst the cheapest. I find most of their shoes a bit ugly, but I do like the Palermos.
Anecdotal, but I just replaced my favorite pair of Pumas, which were at least 12 years old. Granted I didn’t wear them every single day, but at least 2 or 3 days a week for 12 years is pretty good in my book. I’ve had to replace Adidas sooner than that with less wear, but they still last pretty long and I’ll confidently buy both brands. I’d never buy Nike (and wouldn’t wear most Nikes either honestly, just not my personal taste in style)
For some reference, here’s a picture of maybe 2/3 of my shoes, many of which are Pumas. There’s also a couple pairs of Keds in there, but they’re more recent and I don’t know yet how they hold up long term comparatively
Hey, I am also a fan of rotating my shoes. They do seem to last longer that way and are more useful over a longer period of time. I still have Pumas from years ago. They start as my indoor workout shoes, then they are the outdoor casuals, then outdoor workers. I move them to dirtier duty over time. My oldest pair (~15yrs) are on dog-poop duty and now never come inside, but they are about to retire permanently. The hole in the side is now letting in too much moisture so my sock gets soaked. They’ve been good pooper troopers!
Definitely like Adidas better than most
As someone with wide feet, Nike seems to be the only one making shoes that even fit my feet. There’s been numerous Adidas shoes that I wanted to get but the fit is just way too narrow.
Look at Keen or Altra. No idea on the ethicality of either of those though. At this point, I assume all companies are evil unless proven otherwise and try to pay attention and remember when they are evil.
Cool, I’ll check them out. Thanks for the recommendations.
Nikes - made for children by children.
Huh, I would have never thought to ask about most mass produced shoes. I guess my redwing boots are fairly mass produced, and ive gotten those resolved, but even my merril boots I dont think of as being repairable.
I used to work as a bike mechanic in my teens, and it was pretty standard for shops to have a ‘no department store’ policy for repairs. We’d chance a tube, but trying true a wheel, or properly set breaks and gear on those soft metal, low presicision components just wasnt worth it.
I won’t say it’ll always be a good looking repair but it’ll be functional. Always worth it to let one of us take a look
and the obvious sweatshop, factory labor.
I have never had shoes that fit my feet. Ever.
How hard/expensive would it realistically be to design and build/have built my own shoes?
$500-2000 depends on what sort of shoe, where you buy it and so forth. If you go to a poor country it can be had for a lot less though. It might well be worth to have that vacation and find a shoemaker. You certainly will not exploit them nearly as badly as Nike.
Ha. As if I could afford a vacation.
I can’t boycott no harder, we haven’t purchased a name brand in weeks!
Oh look, yet another example of why we should tax wealth and not work.
Republican are the ones that burned Nikes for sponsoring Colin Kaepernick…
Imagine how many copies this sold
Like, four?
They’re not well known for buying books.
Reading them, no. But fuckers love buying them and handing them out. Nothing a conservative uncle loves more than sliding a copy of Atlas Shrugged across the table and saying “Read this if you want to learn about Real Communism, kid”.
And with that, I make like John Galt and never see that uncle again.
“National Bestseller”
Only because the publisher astroterfed sales by ordering thousands of copies of their own book. I doubt anyone who would believe this hysterical bullshit is much of reader.
Ew what is that font? Gross.
🤮
Yep, they were the wokiest of the woke before woke was woke.
Nike also did a lot of donations and promotion of the DNC before now so it is somewhat of a surprising flip. Maybe Phil Knight is acting alone in this endeavor, counter to the company itself?
I resolved never to buy or wear Nike back in the late 90s. The companies practices are abominable but I also hated the culture of conspicuous consumption and the way people believed it gave them license to shit on others for not turning themselves into a walking ad. I grew up poor, so I know the feeling of being made to feel less-than because I got Pro Wings on instead of Jordans.
I know you said pro wings what are there any other brands you recommend? Is adidas any better? Been putting off buying new sneakers since Isreals genocide because every brand I looked at seemed to have some sort of ties.
How has that worked out, watching Nike grow and prosper despite everything shitty they do?
Are you simping for a company?
Like a pick-me girl, except putting humanity down for the attention of companies.
Here’s the thing.
Nike might continue to commit attrocious shit, but you know what?
it ain’t his fault
Is it yours? Can we partly blame you? That’s unfortunate.
I don’t think Nike much cares whose fault it is since they remain unaccountable.
I don’t care what Nike thinks. It’s your concience. Are you going to contribute to their efforts and enable them or aren’t you?
You mean like 99% of people?
Just like your downvote ratio.
My down vote is 99% of people? Do you word much?
It worked out fine. I prefer having a soul that wasn’t assembled by a five-year-old for twelve cents an hour.
Why are old republicans so fucking weird looking.
While Knight is generally reluctant to give interviews, he spoke with the New York Times in October 2022 regarding his support for Republican candidates. He argued Oregon’s government had drifted too far to the left and described himself as “more conservative than Nike,” responding to criticism of him backing an anti-abortion candidate which apparently contrasted with the company’s image of supporting progressive social justice causes.[109] Nike itself donated $75,000 to Drazan and Johnson’s Democratic opponent, Tina Kotek, the eventual winner of the election. - WIKIPEDIA
Not just the old ones, many of them in the administration look super strange with even weirder views.
One looks like they fought a lawnmower at a barbershop and lost, another looks like a fanfic witch from The Matrix, several of them look like cast members from The Witch (movie), others have…odd features that make them look like WW2 villains or slightly methed out. And all of them are batshit insane.
You can’t even find people like that in a big city.
He sells a running shoe. A shoe folks. Now he thinks he has the ability to shape the worlds future because of all the money he made exploiting the producers of the shoes and gouging the customers of the shoe. What a fucking stretch. What is with these “too much money” guys?
They have severe OCD Hoarding Disorder, and they have a serious compulsion to hoard money, even when they have far more than they or their descendents can ever spend.
If this was someone hoarding anything else at that level, cats, rusty cars, newspapers, junk, etc., the government would step in, remove their treasure, and get that person the mental help they require. We should do the same with Financial Hoarders - detain them and get them the mental health care they require, and remove their hoard that is making life difficult for their neighbors. If they were hoarding cats, we’d put them up for adoption, so their financial hoard should be redistributed to the citizens.
Of course a sweat-shop owner is a republican.
Because otherwise there would be a small risk that money would go to taxes instead and help people who need it.
What’re you saying? You don’t think these billionaires need their money?!?
Does a dragon not need its golden hoard?
The dragon earned their hoard! Taking it away is Commie DEI!!!
I’m saying that I wonder about the rate of return of spending that much on lobbying. I’d help him safe money on that, too.
This is exactly why we shouldn’t have billionaires. It’s literally impossible to spend a billion dollars on things for yourself, so what’s left but to spend it on manipulating other people.
They could spend it on bettering the world, but that would never occur to them.
“I don’t want to live in a world where my company isn’t the one company making the world better”
Nazi.
After the recent election? You can kiss that fucking money goodbye. Have fun losing big.
Maybe he’s also invested in the advertising agencies that the candidates will be spending their money with.
I’m sure Russia will appreciate the income.
What a piece of shit
Again
Prohibit billionaires
Cap all netwoths at 10-20 million dollars per person, tops.
Companies should not be worth more than 1 billion dollars, cap it.
Anything over that has automatically 100% go to taxes
Well end up with -instead of one trillion dollar compant- tens of thousands of centillion dollar worth companies, you know, those that aren’t too big to fail and that won’t need bailouts
Well end up with a government that gets so much tax income that it can afford free education, free healthcare, hell, UBI even.
Noone will be super rich and or powerful ever again, no one will be able to usurp all resources for themselves.
Humanity spent 2000 years on perfecting the “0.1% must get as Uber rich as possible” and we got it down to an art to concentrate as much wealth as possible with as little people as possible. It is NOT normal, it is NOT acceptable, ajf it has to stop NOW! It’s destroying our world, literally, as these assholes are the main drivers behind climate change.
Here I am making sure to use as little water as possible and all of my life long work gets thrown into he garbage because miss multimillionaire needs to do grocery shopping with her fucking private jet.
While on this bandwagon, ban all private jets, even for politicians. Maybe maybe we can keep a few as a sort of air ambulance or something z that should be fine, but all the rest, BAN IT. Same for theega yachts, outright world wide ban.
It is bizarre to me that most people just act as if all this is perfectly fine and acceptable. There is no right, no reason why anyone should have a higher net worth than (say) 10 million, so why do we allow this to happen in the first place?
Haven’t we learned anything?
