
Skechers' 'padded' trainers that are still 'comfy' after 12 hours are now £35
These popular Skechers trainers have been reduced to £34.99 on the Amazon website, down from £54 - and shoppers are raving about them
A comfy pair of trainers is vital for your spring/summer collection, and if it's a casual set to pair with your summer frocks or a sturdy set of walking shoes you're hunting for, Skechers has got you covered with its renowned comfy range. A certain pair from this beloved range has been discounted to a mere £35, garnering over 59k reviews by thrilled customers on Amazon.
Originally selling for £54, the Skechers Women's Graceful Get Connected Sneakers are now £34.99 (prices exact at the time of publication). The product blurb on Amazon details: "Easily transition from the gym to all day comfort wear with the Skeckers trainers. Skech Knit Mesh one piece sporty fabric upper in a lace up athletic training sneaker with stitching and overlay accents. Memory Foam insole."
Impressively, these trainers have scored an average of 4.6 out of 5 stars based on customer feedback. A whopping 79% of Amazon buyers have showered the comfy footwear with top-notch five-star accolades.
In other fashion news, if Skechers aren't quite your thing, ASOS is offering a steal on New Balance 530 trainers in swanky white and silver – now only £75, plummeting from their original £100 tag. These, too, boast rave reviews, averaging a stellar 4.8 out of 5, with buyers praising them as an "amazing walking shoe".
In the reviews, one fan raved: "Brilliant shoes, especially if you have a bad back and suffer from aching joints and legs, they are like wearing slippers. I wore them straight away and they did not rub my feet at all, even after 8 hours of work. They fitted like a glove, up and down stairs became much easier for my ankles, they offered great support and they are easy to clean.", reports the Liverpool Echo.
Another reviewer stated: "These are the most comfortable trainers I've ever owned. Not too narrow and super lightweight too. No bedding in needed. I'm usually between a ladies size 7-8 depending on the brand and found the 8 too big but wore them anyway the a while. They are so comfortable I've ordered another pair in a size 7 which fit perfectly. I'll save the size 8 for winter with thick socks. I'd highly recommend this style."
A third reviewer gushed: "If there was a possibility to give more than five, I would give 10 stars. Perfect fit, very light (I don't feel them on my feet), the mesh looks amazing. Overall they look AMAZING. Very comfortable. Worth every penny."
A fourth enthusiast shared: "I only wish I'd found these sooner. After working 12-14 hour shifts, my feet were always sore and aching. I've tried most shoe brands I could think of, but was recommended to theses Skechers.
"The fit is absolutely spot on, the shoes themselves feel like you are walking on clouds, and the memory foam is perfect. Even after a long shift, it still feels like I'm wearing slippers. They are THE most comfortable shoe I have ever owned, and I'm going to order another pair now as I'm simply in love. No more aching or tired feet, thank you Skechers."
However, one customer pointed out that the rose gold trim on the trainers "isn't as glossy in person".

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Scottish Sun
25 minutes ago
- Scottish Sun
Cheaper Fire Stick rival released in the UK TODAY with free TV channel you can't get anywhere else
Plus WhatsApp users have blasted a new in-app feature which uses private data from chats PLAYING WITH FIRE Cheaper Fire Stick rival released in the UK TODAY with free TV channel you can't get anywhere else A CHEAPER Fire Stick rival has been released in the UK today with a free TV channel that you can't get anywhere else. The fresh streaming sticks provide access to the biggest apps around, as well as some hidden gems packed with channels to watch instantly. Advertisement 1 A cheaper Fire Stick rival has been released in the UK today with a free TV channel that you can't get anywhere else What is it called? The Roku Streaming Stick and Roku Streaming Stick Plus replace the existing Roku Express and Roku Express 4K gadgets, promising "more features at the same affordable price points". Cheapest of the bunch is the Roku Streaming Stick at £29.99 / $29.99, costing less than Amazon's equivalent, the Fire TV Stick HD which currently retails for £39.99 / $34.99. This entry-level HD model has some key changes, such as improved Wi-Fi connectivity so you're less likely to have buffering issues that interrupt your favourite shows. And for the first time at this price point for Roku you'll get a voice-enabled remote control too so you can easily find content faster, as well as change the volume and power on the TV. Advertisement For those who want the best picture quality, the Roku Streaming Stick Plus brings you 4K and vivid HDR colour. It costs £10 / $10 more, totalling £39.99 / $39.99. The streaming gadget giant also claims that its sticks are among the most compact around, coming in at 35 per cent smaller than rivals "without compromising performance or speed". Both devices are powered directly by the TV so you will have less annoying cables hanging around too. Advertisement Because unlike Amazon's dongles, which require plugging into the mains, the Roku Streaming Stick and Streaming Stick Plus get all the juice they need from the TV. What is the free channel? Both Amazon and Roku sticks offer instant access to a swathe of apps such as Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV+ and BBC iPlayer, but the Roku has one major advantage. Roku releases brand new way to access 24/7 free streaming channels – it's here just in time for summer break Roku has its own offering called The Roku Channel, which includes a number of originals and "premium entertainment". The Roku channel features movies, shows, entertainment and content for kids. Advertisement Such as Ronin, Dracula, Swimming with Sharks and animations like Super Mario Odyssey and 100% Wolf. It also includes Roku Originals like The Next Black Millionaire, The Charlie Puth Show, Die Hart and The Real Bros of Simi Valley. You can buy both sticks from today at Amazon and in-store at Asda. Other Tech News YouTube has announced a major rule change that will see some creator content banned on the platform. Advertisement A shake-up is coming into effect on July 22 - though some people say the new rules don't go far enough. WhatsApp users have blasted a new in-app feature which uses private data from chats - claiming the tool is unnecessary and unreliable. The Meta-owned app is rolling out a new tool that can whip up a rundown of missed messages with AI - saving users from scrolling through texts. And incredible plans have been revealed for a futuristic jetliner that comes with a see-through cabin and boasts fuel-slashing AI design. Advertisement Touted as the "jet of the future", The Phantom 3500 is a next-generation aircraft that could one day fly at transonic speeds while burning just a fraction of fuel.


Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
How Jeff Bezos' ex-wife Mackenzie Scott is world's away from his lavish Venice wedding - as she ponders Emily Dickinson poetry in essays on giving away her 'disproportionate' $38 billion divorce fortune
As Jeff Bezos prepares to marry Lauren Sanchez during a lavish three-day Italian ceremony, his ex-wife Mackenzie Scott couldn't be further away from the opulent celebrations - in every sense. The novelist, 55, became the world's richest woman after walking away with $38billion and a 4 percent stake in Amazon after their divorce in 2019 - but rather than live lavishly, she devoted herself to giving away her fortune. Mackenzie has acknowledged that she has a 'disproportionate amount of money,' and won't stop donating 'until the safe is empty', in a series of personal essays on her website, Yield Giving, which are peppered with literary references. Meanwhile, Jeff, 61, is set to tie-the-knot with Lauren, 55, at the 15th-century Madonna dell'Orto church in Venice's quaint Cannareggio district this week. Their $20 million bash will begin Thursday and end on Saturday with around 90 private jets set to bring A-listers from show business, politics and finance to the widely-dubbed 'wedding of the century'. In contrast Mackenzie maintains a low public profile, having already donated over $19 billion to more than 1600 charitable organizations. While she has retained her fortune through the success of Amazon and personal business endeavors, she joined the ranks of the world's ultra-wealthy philanthropists as a signatory of the Giving Pledge in May 2019. In essays shared to her website, she writes about her 'desire to be of service' and draws on poetry from Emily Dickinson and Rumi. Following her divorce, Mackenzie shared a passage from Annie Dillard's The Writing Life, explaining how it had 'inspired her over the years.' It read: 'Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book… The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. 'Something more will arise for later, something better… Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.' Reflecting on the piece, Mackenzie drew comparisons to her own life and 'impulse to give.' She wrote: 'No drive has more positive ripple effects than the desire to be of service. 'In addition to whatever assets life has nurtured in me, I have a disproportionate amount of money to share.' In 2020, she reflected on the 'isolated' life lead by poet Emily Dickinson following the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. Mackenzie highlighted the economic losses and the increased number of people living in poverty while the wealth of billionaires had multiplied. That year, Amazon's share price saw Jeff becoming the first person have their fortune break the $200billion barrier after the COVID-19 outbreak sparked a surge in online ordering. Mackenzie played a major role in Amazon's early development, with her stock in the company worth $63billion at the time. The company saw its stock price rise nearly 80 per cent since the beginning of 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic forced people to remain in their homes. That year she increased her giving, explaining via Emily Dickinson's writings how she held on to 'hope' and how se could 'feed it' while helping American's through her charity work. In 2021, Mackenzie discussed how she had been working to 'empower' the 286 organizations that her team had donated to. She said how they were 'amplifying gifts by yielding control' and turned to 13th-century poet, Rumi, to explain. The philanthropist wrote: 'My favorite verse by Rumi captures this well: 'A candle as it diminishes explains, Gathering more and more is not the way. '"Burn, become light and heat and help. Melt.' MacKenzie, who grew up in San Francisco, has been described as a shy child who spent much time alone in her room writing. By the age of six, she'd completed a 142-page novel called The Book Worm. She attended prestigious university Princeton, where she studied fiction, and her literary abilities were praised by her Pulitzer Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, who said MacKenzie was 'one of the best students [she'd] ever had'. Her childhood shyness did not stop her from making the first move when it came to Jeff - she asked him out to lunch one day. MacKenzie told Vogue in 1993 about how they got together, saying: 'My office was next door to his, and all day long, I listened to that fabulous laugh. How could you not fall in love with that laugh?' Three months later, they got engaged, tying the knot three months after that. During the very early years of their marriage, the couple left New York, renting a one-bedroom home in Seattle so Jeff could work on his dream - creating an online bookshop. As one of Amazon's first employees (she was offered an accountancy role when the company started to become successful), she has spoken out about her contribution to the company's success. 'I was there when he wrote the business plan, and I worked with him and many others represented in the converted garage, the basement warehouse closet, the barbecue-scented offices, the Christmas-rush distribution centres, and the door-desk-filled conference rooms in the early years of Amazon's history,' she once said. As Amazon became increasingly successful, Jeff and MacKenzie invested in a portfolio of buildings, snapping up properties in Washington, Beverley Hills, California, Texas and Manhattan, New York. Despite their immense wealth, the couple were determined to maintain a normal family life with their four children - three sons and a daughter they adopted from China. This staggering wealth meant that when the couple divorced, the division of assets was a topic of interest for many. Reports at the time said Jeff 'got off lightly' when it came to the agreement he and Mackenzie came to in their split. While they didn't explain their reasoning behind the division of assets, Mackenzie took just half of what she was entitled to, keeping a four percent stake in Amazon (then valued at worth $35.8billion) as opposed to eight percent. Meanwhile Jeff kept 75 percent of their joint $144billion Amazon stake - a 12 per cent stake valued at that time at around $107.5billion. He also took voting control of his ex-wife's remaining shares, and was given her interest in The Washington Post, which he bought for $250million in 2013, as well as Blue Origin, the space travel company he was investing in. During their 25-year marriage Jeff, was known as a low-key private tech geek, the couple were said to live an 'abnormally normal' lifestyle despite their vast wealth. Tellingly, the billionaire e-commerce giant was still driving a 1997 Honda in 2013 - despite making his first appearance on Forbes list of America's 400 wealthiest people in 1998 - because it was 'a perfectly good car'. In 2019, the National Enquirer exposed Jeff's romance with Lauren Sanchez, and soon after, the billionaire divorced the mother of his four children.


Reuters
2 hours ago
- Reuters
Breakingviews - Europe will struggle to get Big Tech off its cloud
LONDON, June 26 (Reuters Breakingviews) - European businesses have an unanticipated and undesirable problem. Just as the continent has long depended on the military heft of the United States, its companies rely on U.S. cloud computing providers. The huge networks of servers and data centres, used to store information and run critical software, are dominated by a trio of American firms known as hyperscalers. To CEOs, and even governments, that may seem increasingly risky. President Donald Trump has an uneasy relationship with Europe, and U.S. law permits Washington in certain cases to access foreign data stored on hyperscalers' cloud services. The problem, however, is that breaking away is tough. (AMZN.O), opens new tab, Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab and Alphabet's (GOOGL.O), opens new tab Google control around two-thirds of the European Union's cloud market, according to a report, opens new tab on the bloc's competitiveness by former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi. That's largely because the multitrillion-dollar tech giants have the capital to sink into massive data centres, allowing them to offer reliable and relatively low-priced services. Yet U.S. words and deeds arguably make this dependence imprudent. Think of Vice President JD Vance's now-infamous Munich Security Conference speech in February, Trump's reluctance to express full-throated support for Ukraine, and the ongoing uncertainty around his reciprocal tariffs. One CEO of a major European company told Breakingviews that it now makes sense to consider alternatives. No wonder. The U.S. government could in theory access European data stored by the hyperscalers through two legal routes. Courts can issue orders to cloud providers and ask them to hand over customer data to aid criminal investigations. Separately, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) gives Washington's National Security Agency the power to request access to stored information via a special court. It can then share the data it receives with intelligence agencies, meaning the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Central Intelligence Agency. They could conceivably target companies, individuals or institutions that the administration has a problem with. In an even more extreme scenario, the U.S. government could theoretically put political pressure on hyperscalers to shut off cloud services in countries that the White House doesn't like, via a so-called kill switch. Hyperscalers could push back on these concerns by pointing out that FISA, first enacted in 1978, is nothing new. It's supposed to curb international terrorism rather than steal business secrets or help the government pursue political grudges. Europeans have in the past tacitly accepted the possibility of surveillance by a powerful ally in exchange for cutting-edge technology. Yet transatlantic relations are testier now, and even a small possibility of political cloud interference is arguably scary enough to justify action. That's especially true since hyperscalers' data centres also help to power artificial intelligence models, which could in theory play a role in future national defence. European companies have a few options, none of which are perfect. A belt-and-braces approach would involve mobilising local talent and resources to undertake a mass buildout of strategic digital infrastructure. This is essentially the proposal of the EuroStack, opens new tab initiative, an industry coalition pushing for total tech sovereignty in the region. But doing everything from chipmaking to data centre construction won't be fast, easy or cheap. U.S.-based tech trade group Chamber of Progress estimated that building a fully European ecosystem could cost 5 trillion euros, opens new tab. Though a report from the EuroStack group suggests that total investment should be more like 300 billion euros over 10 years, that's still a huge undertaking. Only slightly more plausible is the option of switching to European-made cloud software hosted entirely in European-owned data centres, while accepting that much of the underlying equipment may have a U.S. origin. Companies like $2 billion OVHcloud ( opens new tab or Scaleway, part of French telecoms group Iliad, can provide the servers and data centre resources, for example. But it would be costly and time-consuming to ditch popular subscription software tools, like the Microsoft 365 suite or Google Workspace, and shift away from cutting-edge hyperscaler data centres. Queen Mary University of London researcher Johan David Michels interviewed, opens new tab industry experts for a report – and one heard from a bank that switching cloud provider could cost hundreds of millions of dollars. It's also not clear that the European alternatives have capacity to meet local demand. Mindful of their clients' worries, the big three cloud providers are touting alternatives of their own. Microsoft launched, opens new tab a suite of so-called 'sovereign solutions' last week, stating that these options allow EU customers to control their own data access. Amazon, opens new tab and Google, opens new tab have both flaunted similar products. Whether these services offer Europeans the level of control that they're after is another matter. One EU-based cloud provider told Breakingviews that the flurry of recent hyperscaler launches amounts to 'sovereignty washing', because they can't guarantee that U.S. security agencies won't get sight of sensitive data. That assessment probably goes too far, not least because some of the hyperscalers' options are more secure than others. A relatively palatable one, for Europeans, involves local companies using Microsoft's cloud technologies in a controlled 'walled garden' environment, where the client owns the underlying infrastructure. An example is Bleu, a joint venture between French groups Orange ( opens new tab and Capgemini ( opens new tab. It provides data centres and servers, but lets customers use Microsoft's Azure cloud service and 365 productivity applications, like Outlook and Teams. All the data is stored and managed in France, according to French law. U.S. tech giants have no way of gaining access to the information stored by Bleu on behalf of its clients. But walled gardens, which align with local data protection regulations, require a lot of skilled people to build and maintain, potentially raising the cost compared with standard public clouds. An alternative is 'client-side encryption', where customers' data is cryptographically protected and only clients have the keys to read it. Amazon, Microsoft and Google can also take comfort from the fact that major European clients are locked up in multi-year contracts, and many have more pressing matters than switching. Some continental cloud providers are also subject to U.S. jurisdiction by virtue of their operations in the country. Even the European Commission has bemoaned the lack of local offering to reduce its own reliance on Microsoft 365, according to a report, opens new tab by news website Euractiv that cited internal documents. The upshot is that deep-pocketed clients who are particularly exercised about security – perhaps those in strategically important areas like defence or state agencies – may use more elaborate offerings like Bleu. Hyperscalers still get a slice of the action in those cases. Europe quite literally runs on U.S. tech. Breaking away is easier said than done. Follow Jennifer Johnson on Bluesky, opens new tab and LinkedIn, opens new tab. Follow George Hay on Bluesky, opens new tab.