I keep hearing people in the comments make this claim that it somehow costs anywhere from $2 to $15 to make a pair of shoes that Nike sells for $100+ and resellers sell for $500+...Every time I read i

I keep hearing people in the comments make this claim that it somehow costs anywhere from $2 to $15 to make a pair of shoes that Nike sells for $100+ and resellers sell for $500+...Every time I read it, my shoulders tighten a bit and the thought pops in my head ‘I need to make a post about this’.  
 
I, too, once thought that this is how much it costs to make a pair of shoes. How much can a couple swatches of leather/mesh/rubber/glue actually cost? And putting it together in sweatshop conditions...it sounds reasonable. And then I thought about baseball cards - how much do you think it costs to make a baseball card? 1/10th of a penny? All it is is some paper and some ink. How hard can it be? 
 
Obviously, I had my own cards printed - and I can tell you that the actual cost of a single trading card is nowhere near 1/10th of a penny.  
 
I’ve done research regarding on this in the past...because it didn’t totally make sense to me...and I found a couple of really good articles explaining how much it *actually* costs. Without context - almost anything can cost whatever you want it to cost. If you say a pair of shoes costs $2 to make - without context - you could be talking about the materials alone and some could argue that - yeah, that swatch of pleather and that miniscule amount of glue costs about $2. Or...you could be talking about the labor alone and knowing that in sweatshop conditions it might take someone with skill about 30 minutes to sew a pair of shoes together...you’d probably be right. So all of these claims seem to be made without context. So they are partial truths.  
 
There was a really good article put out a few years ago by solereview, and they broke down ALL of the rumors that people like to spit out there (with no proof). They break down the cost of a pair of running shoes (ie: not a pair of Off White x Playstation x Travis Scott x Drake x Jordan x Dunk x Supreme collabs) for three different companies and told of a hundred different ways it could actually go....the image above is from the article. I’ll get into other pieces over the next couple of days. 
 
Thoughts?