I tried buying leather shoes from an old traditional shoe shop some years back, hoping they'd be more durable. I didn't own those shoes for long. They decomposed quicker than any synthetic shoe I have ever owned, and they weren't waterproof whatsoever. You were also supposed to use shoe cream on them all the time. Very fragile and high maintenance.
I got better shoes by going to a modern sports shop. They looked at how my feet function and chose a shoe made of synthetic rubber and nylon that would offer good support for my feet.
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.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
@Hoss I have read several of the Discworld novels so I'm familiar with that passage you quoted. Isn't it the same book where they described the clacks? The semaphore system they used.
@ChristopherBRobin@Hoss There are some expensive things I know I should be paying for now, but I have rent and groceries and phone bills. It's also rather unpleasant to be in this situation, so I sometimes drink to cope with it, which also costs money. It's called the poverty trap, and people who aren't in it are often disgustingly smug about it.
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