But if you want the closest thing to an objective look at quality and cost, a Danish Web site called runrepeat.com has crunched¹ the numbers from nearly 135,000 consumer reviews it gathered over a year, along with the suggested retail² price of most of the popular brands.

 

The biggest surprise: The higher the price, the lower the rating in many cases. In fact, the 10 most expensive running shoes, with an average list price of $181 per pair, were rated 8.1 percent lower than the 10 cheapest models (average price $61).

 

"If money is a matter to you, you will not get more in expensive running shoes," says the Web site's founder³, Jens Jakob Andersen. "Affordable⁴ mid-range running shoes are very nearly the same as expensive running shoes."

 

That doesn't mean that you should buy $15 running shoes at a department store. Those will almost surely cause you injuries. But Andersen believes that running shoe makers⁵ have poured so much money into marketing⁶ in their battle for a slice of a multibillion-dollar market that we don't know what's real any longer. According to Running USA, 46.25 million pairs of running shoes were sold in 2013, at a cost of $3.09 billion.

 

Most of the shoes reviewed did reasonably well. "Runners are pretty satisfied with the shoes they buy in general," Andersen says. But that also highlights the fairly large satisfaction gap between high- and low-priced shoes.

 

"When you spend more, you expect more," Andersen says in trying to explain why expensive shoes may have disappointed some purchasers. "... But you should not expect to be less satisfied spending more money."

 

Runrepeat bills itself as the Yelp⁷ of running shoes. Andersen says he takes no money from any company, funding the site himself. There are no ads.

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