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- Sep 28, 2004
I always wonder why price points are so high on casual RETROS with no performance? You can spend $105 on a bad quality casual "retro" or jump up and buy a new "performance" Nike for $115-130. The whole "retro" genre is so slighted towards favoring Nike its not even funny. Nostalgia driven sales is so high that you really are paying for very little in terms of performance. Sadly, I believe this is blending in with current Nike performance shoes. "If we can charge $120 for a casual retro shoe that looks and feels bad, why not go about doing this with our performance line?" The doom of true performance is BEYOND us. It starts with forefoot only zoom "performance" shoes, then translates into a kobe VI with 7 year old technology being touted as 'current' and 'top of the line'. Even the new Jordans.. removable insoles??? really? One of them featuring basic "air". Thinking about this whole shoe thing from an outsiders perspective is really eye opening.
I realize the answer to my question is, "because they can". But think about this for a moment. Nike is still satisfied selling a lot of these shoes at outlets. Do you ever wonder why? Some of these are probably so cheap to make that even a $100 msrp shoe selling at $50 is making them $20-30 bucks. I'm a feeler when it comes to Nike shoes, so a chance to walk around a factory outlet and feel the materials, I am almost taken back to the payless days of my youth. Yet everything here is 5-10 times more. But I digress. If Nike is okay with selling many items at outlets and get those prices, you tend to realize where the real MSRP is on some of these shoes. Many of those uptempo retros trying to be sold at $160 unsuccessfully. But on the outlet front, $90-100 isn't so bad of a deal.. Outlets are a great way of neutralizing the effects of over priced items that the true MSRP is finally realized months down the line.
So on the onset, they are trying to rip you off, but outlets drop the price down to more manageable levels. SO yes, Nike Sportswear Retros are worse off quality. But when paying outlet prices you realize that they were never meant to be on par with their OG performance counterpart. Take a $140 dollar retro. It was likely never meant to compete with performance shoes of this era. The price is a bit too high. "Outlet bound", some would call them. So a few months down the line, we see them for $80 bucks. This is where I see the true value of an item. You are getting $80 dollars worth of performance out of this shoe, not $140. The shoes not on sale. This is just a brand new MSRP. They make you think you are getting a deal with the price being so high to begin with, but in reality, I believe you are getting a $80 dollar performance shoe out of that retro.. And compare that with todays $80 dollar performance shoes, the two are likely on par with each other... Call that weird logic if you want, but it really makes sense for me on the vast majority of shoes out there
I realize the answer to my question is, "because they can". But think about this for a moment. Nike is still satisfied selling a lot of these shoes at outlets. Do you ever wonder why? Some of these are probably so cheap to make that even a $100 msrp shoe selling at $50 is making them $20-30 bucks. I'm a feeler when it comes to Nike shoes, so a chance to walk around a factory outlet and feel the materials, I am almost taken back to the payless days of my youth. Yet everything here is 5-10 times more. But I digress. If Nike is okay with selling many items at outlets and get those prices, you tend to realize where the real MSRP is on some of these shoes. Many of those uptempo retros trying to be sold at $160 unsuccessfully. But on the outlet front, $90-100 isn't so bad of a deal.. Outlets are a great way of neutralizing the effects of over priced items that the true MSRP is finally realized months down the line.
So on the onset, they are trying to rip you off, but outlets drop the price down to more manageable levels. SO yes, Nike Sportswear Retros are worse off quality. But when paying outlet prices you realize that they were never meant to be on par with their OG performance counterpart. Take a $140 dollar retro. It was likely never meant to compete with performance shoes of this era. The price is a bit too high. "Outlet bound", some would call them. So a few months down the line, we see them for $80 bucks. This is where I see the true value of an item. You are getting $80 dollars worth of performance out of this shoe, not $140. The shoes not on sale. This is just a brand new MSRP. They make you think you are getting a deal with the price being so high to begin with, but in reality, I believe you are getting a $80 dollar performance shoe out of that retro.. And compare that with todays $80 dollar performance shoes, the two are likely on par with each other... Call that weird logic if you want, but it really makes sense for me on the vast majority of shoes out there
