When I worked in a wet food plant, I bought
Georgia boots based on coworker recommendations and they held up really well. They don't breathe very well but do keep the water out.
I'll never forget my first factory job in a bakery, also lots of dust and water and I bought the cheapest plastic steel toed boots I could find and they were okay. Four years there, then I went to work as a green tire sorter in a tire factory and everyone said, "Get some better shoes." I said, "Nah, I have been working 10 hour shifts at high pace on my feet in these $19 plastic boots for years with no problem." They said, "This concrete is different". I didn't believe them. They were right. I made it two days and was heavily blistered up.
I got a pair of steel toed tennis shoes. At that time, I stacked 3200 to 4000 tires a day, 8 hours a day, 6 days a week, so no shoes lasted more than 6 months. Once I moved into maintenance, I switched to pull on boots after the first time I spilled cutting torch slag on my lace up boots. I still wear pull on boots, but I sit on my a$s so much, the brand and quality are not nearly as important.
That concrete had so much ground up steel mixed in it, you could stick a magnet to it. That was done to resist fork truck traffic. It was allegedly 3 to 4 feet thick too and super hard. There was so much metal in it, I saw a guy run a bead with an arc welder to tack a stock guide to the floor in a pinch when there were no places left to set an anchor. "You can't weld to concrete!" He said, "Watch me." Okay, a few pops, and it was ugly but it held for two days.
