Originally Posted by
BigBallinBruce
Originally Posted by Darkwing Duck
young kids had their moms stand in line and cop back in the day too, this is no new phenomenon.
And kids still beg their moms to buy them shoes.
Inflation has made the price go up, we get paid more than we used to also.
agreed...minimum wage has gone up a lot. Minimum wage in 1988 was $4.25
Now, in 2010 it has almost doubled. I believe in illinois it is above $8.00. Good thing the retail price on jordans hasn't doubled....if that were the case, the CG's would be nearly $250.
Are you forgetting that in 1988, Air Jordans were $100? The 2010 AJs retail for $170, so while the federal minimum wage has nearly doubled, so has the retail price of a pair of Jordans (despite a recession), rendering that argument invalid.
I've also mentioned several times why the "inflation" argument doesn't work when applied to retro Air Jordans. You have to remember that the price for the originals included paying designers to come up with the design, the cost of producing initial batches/samples for research and development (trying a variety of materials, testing durability and comfort over and over again, reworking the molds for each improvement, etc), THEN comes the final costs of producing the molds, purchasing the materials, etc for the final version of the product. With retros, this last part is the only thing to factor into the cost of producing the shoes. Designing, researching and developing, testing, etc were all done a decade or 2 ago, and should no longer be taken into consideration for final cost of product. All they have to worry about now is reproducing the molds, getting the materials, and paying someone $.80/day to put them together. Factor in that they're cutting even more corners by using lower quality materials, and shaving off some of the more expensive trim, and you've damn near matched the cost of materials from a decade ago. In other words, they could maintain the original $125 price tag of the shoes today, and make even MORE than they did when they were new due to the development costs being nearly non-existent for retros, and the cutting of corners on materials and trim.
Notice when they first started retroing shoes, the price tags were pretty close to the originals, if not exactly the same, even though a decade or more had gone by in many instances (so there was already inflation over what the USD was worth when the originals came out). This is especially true for the Is, IIs, etc. Despite being at original MSRP, they still didn't sell well. On the other hand, those shoes that sold well, or had people foaming at the mouth for their release, carried a higher price tag than the originals that slowly crept up with each release/rerelease of that shoe. What does this suggest? The higher price tags are there on the more popular shoes ONLY because they know they can get away with it, not because of inflation. JB learned very quickly how much they could charge for each shoe. YOU guys determine the prices, not inflation.
