Nowadays, when looking for shoes you may like, many are out of your price range but in the last few years they were much cheaper. This is very upsetting to many because a really cool shoes could be marketed for a reasonable price but then sell out immediately and they are only to be found on other websites for over double the original price. For example, the Air Jordan 4 was previously sitting in stores like Footlocker and Nike stores but are now only available by buying through resellers for way more than when they were in stock.
The price of the Jordan 4 Black Cat colorway was originally $190 but is now over $1,000 dollars. Paying $1,000 for an all black shoe is absurd. So what are the reasons behind these prices?
One of the main reasons are resellers and a community known as “sneakerheads”. Social media hype also impacts prices of shoes. For example, on social media like TikTok, there are slideshows and videos hyping up an upcoming shoe and the sneakerhead community all want a pair of the shoe. When they release, many people that resell shoes or are interested in the shoe all try to buy the shoe on an app called SNKRS.
SNKRS is an official app by Nike where new shoe releases can be bought. Numbers of sneakers being sold on SNKRS are not high and are usually limited in numbers. Many people buy services where they use bots to automatically buy the shoe. The majority of people still manually try to order as fast as possible. All of the traffic on that page to buy the shoe can cause the page to slow down.
In the following days, the shoes that were sold for retail will be on websites like Ebay, StockX,and GOAT for hundreds more than it originally was. Even some older pairs have been skyrocketing in price recently. Many examples are shoes like the Nike dunks, some Jordan 1’s and Jordan 4’s. Those certain models of shoes are also mostly trending online.
Many Nike Dunks and SB Dunks retailed for the low 100s or less and are now around the $250 mark. Dunks have always been popular but the prices have not been this high.
Just a few years ago Jordan 4’s have not been too popular and were easy to buy for retail price but after 2020, they prices are hundreds of dollars more expensive and are never at normal shoe stores unless they are kid sizes.
The year 2020 has been a clear year of prices suddenly rising on shoes. If you look at charts of many shoes, there is a massive rise specifically on that year. In 2020, there was a 30% increase in people buying shoes. The pandemic caused factories to slow down and shoes were were put on shelves less frequently. Many people were on social media because we were stuck in our homes and sneakers were trending.
The following year in 2021, The Panda Dunk released and now it seems like almost everyone has a pair. This brought an uprise Dunks and many people started buying them. After 2020, many shoes that are popular were fairly obtainable at a good price are now only available on reselling websites and those hype shoe stores in shopping malls that put all the popular shoes for overpriced. Many people see others with shoes that are popular on Tiktok and want a pair only to see that they are way over their price range. That causes people to buy replicas of the shoes online. There are a few people on campus I see wearing the Black Cat Jordan 4’s. They are most likely replicas as that colorway is around 1,000 dollars and I don’t think a highschooler has that money or if they did they would probably buy them as an investment or to not wear them.
I don’t blame them because paying for the real shoe is simply not worth it. Many people say that buying replica shoes are unethical because the real company is not making money from it. I disagree with that because if you want to really wear a shoe and not just collect it or resell it, then you should not spend more than like $200 dollars.
Bryan Esquivel, freshman, says: “I think shoe prices are getting overpriced and its not fair because we can’t get good shoes anymore.” He also says he would purchase replicas if the shoes were too expensive: “I would say yea because they are getting too expensive and it dosen’t really matter if they are fake or real.” Overall the main reasons sneakers are becoming more expensive is social media hype and scarcity of the shoes.
