Straight-Laced

I was just retiring a set of sneakers that I’ve had for long enough that the soles had cracked across the ball of the foot. I’d just finished lacing up a pair of dress shoes that I’d polished for an event this weekend, and I decided to pull the sneaker laces since they were in fine shape.

As I was stripping them out, though, I tried to remember the last time I actually needed to replace a pair of laces and I couldn’t. When I was a kid I always had to replace laces, tie together laces that had broken, etc. Has shoelace technology progressed to the point at which the laces now outlast the shoes?