One interesting result of post-WWII global commerce and industrialization is the emergence of cheap luxury goods.
While that may at first sound oxymoronic, it's an actual thing: relatively poor people can (or could, up until a couple of years ago) buy an astonishing array of affordably-priced shiny things that may or may not improve their lifestyles, but that are definitely nonessential.
This leads to much hand-wringing on the parts of the Goodthinkful Classes, and to calls for new sumptuary laws to keep poor people from wasting their money on cheap, unnecessary junk, as well as the outright elitism that decries the existence of poorly-made affordable goods: if people can't afford fine handcrafted toys* for their children, then by golly they should go without!
Then, too, there's the consumer-products version of Gresham's Law, and this one really applies to boots (as well as to many other things). If you're shopping for a new pair of boots, you'll easily find cheap boots that might last a season of light use. You'll also find cheaply-made boots, that might last a season, upbranded and sold at crazy high prices. What you won't find, at least not easily, is something like the lightweight, mixed-material boots I had back in the mid-1980s, that lasted for several years of serious hiking - and by the time they wore out, the entire category had disappeared. If you want boots that will last, you pretty much have to go industrial, and have big, stiff, heavy, clunky boots (guaranteed to keep your tootsies safe), or search for where the rich people buy their boots (pretty much guaranteed to bust a middle-class budget, never mind working-class)**.
The same goes for many sorts of equipment: there's the cheap-crap tier, possibly with some subtiers featuring varying degrees of chrome and overpricing, and there's the capital-equipment tier, which may be built to last but it's not the sort of thing you buy with your own money (and it may not be appropriate***, or even legal****, for home use). The solid, good-quality, mid-priced items have largely disappeared, or at least require a lot of searching.
A note put in line here, because my asterisk bin is empty: "contractor grade" tools are a special subtier of the cheap-crap tier; they're good enough to do useful work for a useful amount of time, but cheap enough that if they get broken, run over, or just misplaced at a job site, it's no big deal. The contractor expects to replace them periodically, and budgets accordingly. Don't buy a contractor-grade chainsaw expecting it to last a lifetime because you'll only run it once in a couple of years; it's made to be run hard and thrown away, and likely won't take kindly to sitting on the shelf.
I'm not sure where (if anywhere) I'm going with this... but it ties in with my observation from several years ago that the newly successful - mainly the tech poltroons tycoons poltroons - seem determined to pull the ladder of success up behind themselves. We got ours; all you poors have to stay poor, because success destroys the planet!
* Some years back, a new CPSC safety regulation effectively made it flat-out illegal to sell one-off children's products in the U.S.; I'm not sure what the status of that is now, but you know it's not enforced against bespoke toymakers to the ruling class.
** The sad story of the planet Brontitall, and of the Shoe Event Horizon, comes to mind.
*** Some of the gear used by lawn-mowing services is not only priced way out of my range, but appears unreasonably dangerous for the home-gamer.
**** I'm having some vague recollection of an issue with professional-grade gas ranges and residential fire codes.
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