Shoes, or more specifically, shoe repair

I need to do some crowd sourcing because I think I need to realign my expectations. Here's my story.

Last year J. needed some new work shoes, so took advantage of a sale at a not-high-end department store. They were not real leather, but they looked decent and the price was within our budget. Well, the soles on one of those pairs of shoes have cracked making them not so great especially in wet weather. When we lived in Evanston, I would just run our shoes up to the shoe repair guy and for a nominal fee, he would fix soles, heels, and whatever else needed fixing. So we decided to try a shoe repair place out here to see if we could extend the life of a pair of shoes whose uppers were still in good shape even if they weren't real leather. That particular errand was on today's list, so after some really horrible Maps instructions I eventually found the place. When I asked about having them resolved, I was informed I probably didn't want to do that. I did actually want to have them resolved, what he meant was that I probably didn't want to pay what it would cost. 

You ready? 

The total would be $90! 

So here's my question. Well, two questions. 1. Does anyone else find this utterly ridiculous? And 2. If you have had a pair of shoes resoled recently, was the cost in this ball park? Have prices in the past eight years really gone up that much? I really don't want to throw away something that could be repaired, but we might as well get J. a new pair of shoes for that money. 

And then I'm left thinking about a quote in a Terry Pratchett Disc World book J. and I both read this summer.

"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." From Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett