Wow. I buy a couple of packs of Walmart socks (probably about $20 as you said) and that lasts me about the 8 years even if I'm using them for running and such. I wonder if there is some other factor (shoe fit, toe nails, etc.) that is adding additional wear?

On their website, for the warranty it wasn't clear to me if they provide the packaging and postage to ship to them, only that they ship for free to you. In that case, that might add to your cost especially if you have to do it multiple times (plus the hassle of actually shipping). I guess it really comes down to whether these socks are so good that you virtually never need to replace them vs if you're going to have to keep using the warranty every few years.

The other concern I have is that their website says you send them the old socks and they send you the replacement for free. So, it sounds like you might have to pay to ship the socks to them and for the packaging to do so. If that's the case, that should be factored in.

Also worth noting that because of everything you said, you actually DO see companies coming in and dramatically undercutting if they have a different business model.

• Dunkin and Starbucks have a similar business model so they have (roughly) the same markup which is relatively high.
• If you go to a diner, you'll find that not only is their coffee cheaper, but it often has free refills which makes it much cheaper. This is because their business model is even more skewed toward higher priced meals being where the money is made rather than coffee.
• Even farther along the spectrum, if you go to a car dealership to get your car serviced, you'll often find they'll give you free coffee because their business model is so heavily skewed toward the service fees for the car.

> how does light get reflected?

Photons ("packets of light") bounce off of particles (atoms, molecules).

> does it get reflected in all directions or in the direction where it came?

Keep in mind, if it only reflected back in the same direction, you'd never see anything that is opaque because all of the light emitted from a source (lamp, sun) would bounce right back to that source rather than your eyes. The fact that you can see your wall when you turn a lamp on tells you that light doesn't just bounce right back at the lamp.

It gets reflected the same as anything. Just like when you hit a pool ball. You have to remember that "light" is not a single photon (or beam) following one path though. Even a laser... you can see the dot is a couple of millimeters wide. Many atoms can fit in a couple of millimeters which means when you shine the laser at a material, some of the photons will hit spots where there is an atom, but others won't. In this way, even if they all follow the same rules about bouncing, some will bounce and others won't.

Think of it like dropping 10 balls side-by-side into the top of a Pinball machine. We cannot generally say "all balls will do X" since they're all in different positions and may hit different obstacles in the pinball machine. But we can say that in one pinball machine all the balls pass right through because there is no barrier, in another they jumble up a lot because there are many barriers and in yet another they just get stuck because there are too many barriers.

In the same sense, different materials (mirrors, glass, bricks, air) will tend to bounce stuff in certain ways based on the way their atoms are positioned. If the bouncing tends to happen in a way where two photons that are close to each other on the way in are also next to each other on the way out, you'll get something that looks like a mirror, but if the structure leads to bouncing where photons that started near each other will exit in different directions then it might look more like a brick. Photons also come in different "sizes" based on their color. So, if you shine a white light (white is made up of all the colors) some photons might bounce back at you but others might not. For example, with a brick, the red photons will bounce back at you, but the blue will mostly not. So, it looks reddish.

So, while the rules of light bouncing are pretty simple and similar to how you see anything bounce, the fact that "light" is usually many beams of photons and the objects you're shining them are are piles of atoms with huge gaps in between means that really complex effects can happen where millions of different bounces are occurring for different parts of the beam or even different colors of light and that creates all these different effects we see.

> does light gets weaker everytime it gets reflected i mean does the reflection gets weaker even time it also reflects?

It tends to, but it doesn't have to. What a "weaker" reflection means is that less photons hit your eyes. Given that each time a beam of light reflects again, there is some chance it will scatter a bit, that tends to mean that as it reflects more and more, there will be less photons hitting your eye.