Some shoes get cheaper in a weekend sale and bounce straight back. The New Balance ABZORB 2000 has been sitting at clearance money for months: $99.90 on Amazon today against a $169.99 list price, $70.09 off, with six colorways left carrying the cut. Nothing was slashed this morning. The shelf underneath the deal is what has been shrinking.
Read today, New Balance’s own product page shows the shoe sold out in the US store, which leaves the maker’s $99.99 sale price with nothing behind it. Amazon still stocks the shoe, and the entry pair lands at $99.90 before the number starts moving by size and colorway.
Price: $99.90
Regular Price: $169.99
You Save: $70.09 (41%)
Where to buy: Amazon
Visible tech, taken literally
ABZORB showed up in 1993 as New Balance’s top cushioning compound, a foam and rubber blend built to absorb impact and hand energy back. The 2000 rebuilds that idea as hardware you can see from across the room: a full-length ABZORB setup with translucent ABZORB SBS pods segmented along the sole, the kind of visible tech the brand’s 2000s running classics turned into a signature.
SBS is the pod half of the package. The translucent chambers run the full length of the midsole, visible from the side and from underneath, and the silhouette is built around them: focal point first, cushioning unit second, in that order. The proportions only make sense once you accept that ordering.
From the side, the pods are the silhouette.
Under the foot, the sole splits into separated pod chambers, forefoot to heel. A Stability Web shank bridges the midfoot inside that segmented unit, and sculpted detailing runs along the sidewall, so the bottom half looks engineered while the top half stays calm.
The design started in 3D
New Balance previewed the shoe at Milan Design Week in April 2025, two months before the June 12 launch. Design manager Charlotte Lee framed the brief as a balance problem: heritage on one side, modernity on the other, with the past run through a modern lens. The design process leaned on 3D tools early, which is how the sole ended up, in the brand’s words, hyper detailed and articulated. Pairs sold that June at the full $170.
The shoe sits inside a wider bet: New Balance keeps expanding its 2000s design language, and the 2000 is the visible-tech end of the push.
Its sibling tells the same story from the other direction. The ABZORB 2010, released a month earlier, pairs the family cushioning with a diamond-patterned engineered mesh upper and launched at $160.
A quiet upper over a loud sole
Mesh does most of the upper’s talking, and it keeps its voice down. Printed overlay patterns draw the speed lines, the N is printed rather than stitched, and reflective accents sit in the pattern for low light. Against the pod stack underneath, the restraint looks deliberate: one loud idea per shoe, placed where the eye lands first.
The reflective accents are there to catch light, per the product sheet, and they sit inside the pattern rather than on top of it. It is the one functional detail on an upper that otherwise keeps quiet, and at night it is the part of the shoe doing the talking.
Specs stay plain: 419.2 grams, made in Vietnam, unisex sizing from 4 to 16. Nobody is cross-training in these, and the weight says so: it is a lifestyle shoe built on running tech, not a trainer.
Six colorways carry the deal
The sale set runs to six style codes at the maker’s $99.99: Black (U2000ETB), Slate Grey (U20006OU), Black Cement with Podium Red (U20001VD), plus U20008LL, U20004PO and U20001B6. Night Lights (U20001K7) joined in August at the same $99.99 against $169.99, so the set was still being fed months into the run.
Black Cement with Podium Red is the loudest of the six: black, cement grey, and red in the mix. The dark grey pair on the $99.90 Amazon listing keeps one tone from toe to heel, translucent pods included, and Slate Grey splits the difference with silver laid over grey mesh and black at the laces.
Amazon’s spread is wider and less tidy. The entry listing starts at $99.90 with a 4.8-star average across 34 ratings, Slate Grey opens at $100.72, and White and Silver Metallic sits at $114. Expect the number to move with the size on the label.
A long clearance, late in its run
The price history is the part most deal posts skip. Outlet stores had the shoe at $100 in May, inside a wider New Balance clearance, and the $99.99 figure was already the standing price by August, when thirteen colorways carried it. Six carry it now. A clearance does not get fresher as the colorways drain out of it, and the maker’s own sold-out page says the drain is well along.
So the buy is narrow and simple. If the pod stack is what you wanted at launch and $170 felt like fashion money for a cushioning demo, $99.90 fixes the math on the same shoe, same pods, same printed N. If you wanted a trainer, it was the wrong shoe at $170 and it is still the wrong shoe now, just cheaper.
What you give up is choice. The colorway you want, in your size, is the thing a long clearance takes first, and six colorways is not thirteen. That is the whole trade at this point in the run: price for selection.
Price: $99.90
Regular Price: $169.99
You Save: $70.09 (41%)
Where to buy: Amazon
The launch crowd paid $170 for the pods. The clearance crowd pays $99.90 for the same ones.
