I enjoy asking someone their shoe size right before I measure their foot…According to my unscientific research, at least 70% of the feet I measure, are being put into the wrong size shoe.
I don’t enjoy discovering that someone’s foot size (heel to ball) measures an 11.5 and the running shoes they have been wearing is a 10…which might also explain why their toenails are turning purple.
And…I am shocked and appalled when I come across a shoe that has a different heel to ball length vs. heel to toe length. New Balance 858 is such a shoe. A design flaw, I call ‘disproportionate’. In this case, the shoes arch length is long relative to the toe box length. Fine for someone who has really short stubby toes, but way too short in the toe box for the rest of us. Oh, I almost forgot, that would be short stubby toes and narrow foot, because of the narrow outsole, which makes this shoe a nearly impossible match to anyones foot.
To their credit, New Balance makes many styles of shoes, and this is one very specific style. And this one style doesn’t make all New Balance shoes bad, (i.e, “1 bad apple don’t spoil the whole bunch, girl…”) and most manufactures make ‘disproportionate’ shoes once in a while.
As a member of my posse, your job will be to stop buying disproportionate shoes. Eventually, when these styles don’t sell, shoe manufacturers will stop producing them, and eventually, shoes will start to fit better.
Dr. Jenny Sanders Shoe Blog 
Aha- your review explains why I love this shoe so much but it gets generally bad reviews on sites like Road Runner Sports. I do have short stubby toes! (Not freakishly so, but I’ve always noticed they’re kind of – petite!- compared to other people’s feet. And these shoes are the best fit I’ve ever had! I actually have quite wide feet – many women’s shoes don’t fit. But I like a shoe that doesn’t feel like a big swimming pool for my foot and this is JUST RIGHT. For me, anyway!