I went shopping for a pair of low-cost, casual black pants with a 34" waist and 28" inseam. I nearly always buy my pants online from either landsend.com or jcpenney.com because I'm short, not very good at hemming pants and don't want to have to pay for tailoring, and those two merchants normally have great choices in my size. This time, though, they both came up with too few choices for too much money, so I decided to see what I could find on amazon.com. The reviews on these pants generally looked good. I'd never bought "work pants" before, and the description conjured up images of warehouse uniform pants, but the price was low enough that it seemed worth a gamble. I am not at all disappointed.

The pants felt rather stiff when they arrived. They soften up as you wash and wear them, so some customers may want to put them through the washer and dryer a few times before wearing them for the first time. I've washed mine 4 or 5 times now, and they're still stiffer than my chinos are, but not unpleasantly so. They seem to be holding their color well, with no noticeable fading so far. They hold their shape well, too, and come out of the dryer wrinkle-free and ready to wear.

Other reviewers have said that the sizing on these pants runs small. I did not find this to be the case, but these are "regular" fit pants with very little stretch, so men with a little extra padding below the belt may find them a bit snug.

My one quibble is that the front pockets are a bit narrow and don't move around, so some guys might find their wallets or keys or pocket change a bit difficult to extract, or that the pockets press them against the wrong contours. (No, not THOSE contours! The pockets aren't far enough forward to have to worry about that...<g>)

Other reviewers report getting over two years of wear out of Dickies 874 pants. I've only had mine for about a month, so I can't comment on long-term wear, but the material certainly feels tough enough to last a long time. For what it's worth, I usually get about a year of wear from a pair of cotton or cotton/polyester chinos (at two wearings and one laundering per week), but Dickies 874s feel like they're made out of stronger material, so I anticipate that they will last longer.

Style-wise, Dickies 874s don't look much different from chinos, so you can get away with wearing them in "smart casual" situations.