To be fair, you’ve probably already got your own reasons for not buying Nike products. Their open support for Colin Kaepernick and his modus operandi of causing racial divisiveness might be one reason people have openly called for boycotting Nike, for example. Their reputation for allegedly using sweatshops and abusing child labor to produce their products, if true, is another excellent reason.
But do you want to know the very best reason not to spend $100 on a pair of horribly overpriced and crappy Nike tennis shoes? They can literally fall apart on you during a match. Here’s the evidence. Notice that other than the sole coming completely unglued, the shoes don’t look like they are in bad shape. That’s because they sat in my closet for a couple of years after I bought them because I needed surgical repairs on my elbow.
Sitting in a closet unused does not qualify as normal wear and tear on the product, in my opinion. Yet as you can see in the photo below, the soles are still in very good, “almost new” shape, except for one little problem…they literally came unglued, when my partner and I were in the middle of an intensely competitive playoff doubles match.
[Note: The stuff that looks like fuzz on the outside of the shoes is actually dog hair that stuck in the glue residue. The fur babies have been shedding like crazy in this heat, and I accidentally stepped in some dog hair when the soles were not in place.]
Notice that the heel pads are also detached. I didn’t even realize it until I got home. I had four different, moving surfaces under my feet during the match. Playing the match in these tennis shoes marketed and sold by Nike was a recipe for disaster. This is absurdly poor quality.
Nike’s customer service department didn’t care about the condition of my shoes; they only wanted to know the date of purchase. While the shoes sat unused in my closet for a couple of years, the warranty had expired. That’s all they needed to deny any warranty claims. Buyer beware, indeed.
Lesson learned: snowball will form in hell before I buy another pair of shoes from Nike (or any product with their insignia on it, for that matter because I don’t want to help market their obscenely overpriced garbage products) that could cause you to get seriously injured if you don’t happen to notice they are falling apart during your match. If you’re familiar with the game, it isn’t exactly easy to play, and especially not if you’re looking down at your feet instead of watching the ball. I happened to look down before hitting a serve and thought, “Well, that doesn’t look right.”
In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll be completely upfront and honest with the reader. I cheerfully admit that I usually get my money’s worth out of a pair of tennis shoes because I am hard on them. A pair typically only lasts about six months because of how much running I do on the court and the fact that 95 percent of my matches are played on hard surfaces. However, what normally happens is the soles of the shoes get gradually worn down, sort of like a tire losing tread rubbed off by the road over time. I don’t think I’ve played more than a dozen matches in the Nikes, based on their appearance.
For a fair comparison, these are the bottoms of my Wilson shoes, which I had retired when I realized I had a pair of almost new Nikes in the closet that appeared to be in great shape. Notice the white patches near the left toe of the Wilson shoes, the right instep, and the heels on both sides. Also note the treads are almost completely gone at the ball of my foot on both shoes. Clearly, I got my money’s worth out of the Wilson shoes.
The Nikes? Not so much.
Please compare this image with my photo of the Nike soles once more. See the difference? The soles of the Nike shoes look almost new by comparison, based on normal wear and tear. If the soles had remained intact, I probably would have had three or four more months of play out of them. But now I won’t trust them, even if I re-glue them.
The moral of this story: Wilson makes a pretty good shoe. Nike does not. If you’re thinking about buying something from Nike, just DON’T do it.
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