The one thing I can never ever ever understand about women and what they wear is the shoes. They wear shoes that are beyond flimsy, are uncomfortable, restrict their movements and can cost a small fortune.
Can any women explain how in the world you all got conned into this scam?
Most women get conned into it because there are almost no alternatives, and of the few there are, a lot of people just can't afford them.
They just
don't make quality women's shoes. It doesn't matter how much money you spend, all you're paying for is fashion or the brand. The quality of the shoe is still going to suck. Shoes for women are very much built on the "planned obsolescence" principle.
I personally am a quality and comfort-based shopper. I don't do heels and that kind of thing. I'm certainly not alone in that amongst women, but I can see why a lot of women give up and just buy what looks good.
It took me years to figure this out, because I knew that when men spend more on shoes, they get more quality. I tried to do this when I started being financially better off, because good shoes are worth investing in. But no matter how much I spent, I kept winding up with uncomfortable crap that broke down in a season for two.
That is by design. Often, shoe companies that do men and woman's lines will still make crappy shoes for women, but good ones for men. For an example, look at Fry's. It's almost insulting how blatantly inferior their women's line is in terms of quality of construction. And yet they cost just as much money as the men's shoes, if not more.
At the end of the day, in order to get quality shoes that will last me years, I had about a handful of choices of companies, all of which were very expensive. I was fine with it being expensive, as long as the quality came with it and was the same as the comparative men's shoe.
I wound up getting Wesco boots discounted from factory seconds (they actually didn't have flaws; they were just never picked up by the customer who I guess had more money than sense, and as a result they were still knocked down to about half price). They are the ****ing best. Expensive as hell, but I'll tell you what, I'm gonna be buried in those boots. I've had them for 2 years now and I still get asked if they're new, and "how they're breaking in." They don't even need a resole yet, and I've done lots and lots of miles in these things.
Unfortunately, this is pretty much the ONLY aesthetic that quality women's shoes come in: leather ****-kickers. Fortunately I'm totally in to that. You have stuff like Docs and Grinders in the midrange, and then up to stuff like Wesco for the higher end. But if that's not your aesthetic, which it isn't for most women... sorry, you're basically SOL. That's all there is.
Basically, if you want even passable quality women's shoes, there's no way you'll spend less than $150, and you only have one choice of look.
So, women buy into the con because there aren't very many other options.
Just one of the millions of ways a sex-divided market rips women off. Women in the know also buy men's razors: they're sharper and less expensive simultaneously.
