I don’t think this is quite a sufficient explanation. If I were an investor / owner of a distributor or retailer, I think I would observe that these businesses

I don’t think this is quite a sufficient explanation. If I were an investor / owner of a distributor or retailer, I think I would observe that these businesses don’t scale arbitrarily and I would care about returns as a function of cost of goods sold, operating expense, and of cost of customer acquisition. In this context, cost of goods sold will include actual wholesale cost as well as associated costs that scale along with it: insurance, shrinkage, samples, etc. Cost of customer acquisition will not scale as strongly with wholesale cost — one would need to advertise a bit more to convince people to buy a more expensive shoe, but this should be less than linear. And operating expenses (retail square footage, warehouse space, cashiers, shipping and handling) are almost independent of the cost of the pair of shoes. All that being said, tariffs drive up the cost of living, which drives up wages, which makes everything more expensive.