Some true shittification has been happening with shoes for sure. I used to get years of pretty extreme sports use from a pair of pretty cheap trainers and in the last years when I haven’t been training nearly as much or walking nearly as much they only last a season at best. No matter how much you pay.

One thing that has annoyed me the most is that in the past you got running shoes with that thicker cover over the toes always, that really helped in not getting your feet wet. Now they all are just that knitted stuff all the way to the sole and my toes are just always wet in the rain. If you want ones with that small piece of strurdier stuff, they are all in the price ranges that I can’t afford to buy.

It’s the Sam Vimes “Boots” theory:

"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."

Men at Arms - Terry Pratchett