"...but the real reckoning came almost as soon as the ink dried on the 1999 trade agreement the United States signed with China. Wages were so cheap there that (aided by the occasional World Trade Organization violation) Chinese companies could import U.S. lumber and ship the final product back by the container load and still sell their goods for less than U.S. companies paid in material costs."
It's easy to skim over this section without realizing how insane this is. Example: my brother works in the wood industry for a company producing wooden floors based in the Netherlands.
They source the wood from a production forest in Belgium. From Belgium's Antwerp harbor it would be an extremely short route to Rotterdam, after which the wood can be processed.
No. Instead, from Antwerp it's shipped half-way across the planet to China. There it is sawed into boards, grinded, and shipped to Rotterdam, again crossing half the planet. Back in the Netherlands, they do some finishing touches like sawing custom sizes and applying polish.
Can you fucking believe this? We're talking about trees here, they're absurdly heavy. They're making a full round trip across the planet. Whilst 75% of the work on those trees is machine-based.
The trees and the people/machines are right next to each other. And still we can't make the economics work. That's because the economics are a scam. Trade deals, subsidized shipping, state sponsorship from China. You can't compete on wages when everything is asymmetrical.
We just don't care enough. The amount of apathy the average person in a developed country has for the rest of their fellow man is astounding if you stop and think about it for a bit. People love to go on and on about how capitalism is good and paying them pennies isn't exploitation, we're lifting countries up into the "first world" and that's true to an extent, while conveniently ignoring that the countries being lifted up are either suffering for it themselves or are just shifting the exploitation farther down the line. Eventually we're gonna run out of people to shit on in order to make our lifestyles possible, and that's when it'll get interesting.
I've already written about this before on here so I'll just plop that down instead of rehashing it more:
I've read that there is a certain number of people that we're basically optimized to coexist within a societal structure, and modern civilization passed that a long time ago, and human beings in general just aren't capable of empathy on the scale of modern civilization. And I mean, it makes sense when you think about it. On some abstract level you have to know that even meagre standards of living in western society requires someone, somewhere to be suffering to provide it. $1 for a pound of bananas shipped from across the world before they even have a hint of yellow on them? That shit don't come without a cost, and our $1 sure as hell aint paying it. But we all just kind of don't think those people just to get through the day, because dwelling on the extent of suffering and horror we've wrought upon our fellow man in pursuit of whatever fresh hell the guys over at Oreo have managed to shape into the general form of a cookie would leave us a broken shell of a person and unable to show up for our next shift at the Big Mac factory.
"We just don't care enough. The amount of apathy the average person in a developed country has for the rest of their fellow man is astounding if you stop and think about it for a bit."
I wasn't going for that angle. I wasn't talking about the labor part. I accept that labor competes internationally. I have no moral right to a higher pay for the same work.
That's not the issue. The issue is that it shouldn't be possible to ship an oak tree across the entire planet for practically nothing. The true cost is not nothing, it has to be enormous. The "natural" pricing is heavily distorted by subsidies, trade deals, lack of taxation, dismissing all externalities, state sponsorship, the like.
None of this has anything to do with fair competition based on labor. It's a rigged game.
I can get an item shipped to me from China on Aliexpress for a few cents or even free. The same package shipped to me from my own city costs several dollars.
Business interest in the US totally screw over local producers and few politicians seem to care.
>it shouldn't be possible to ship an oak tree across the entire planet for practically nothing
Why not? Modern lumber carrier vessels are massive. Optimizing for maritime bulk cargo transport to ship across world economically vs western wages seems very feasible.
But globally poverty has been radically decreasing over the last few decades (although perhaps not so much since 2020). For example in 2010: “Globally, poverty is about a quarter of what it was in 1990” from https://www.humanprogress.org/five-graphs-that-will-change-y... . That is an old article but the trend of reduction in poverty continued from 2010 to 2020. Note much of that reduction is due to China, and Africa hasn’t improved as much.
Well, it's insane. But I'm sure I can think of hundreds of other equally insane things.
What can I do about any of them? Very little if I reject society, live in a cave and forage for berries. Also very little if I attempt to enter politics, even if moderately successful.
So I buy the fair trade bananas - for all the good that'll do - and try to tolerate all the madness.
> The trees and the people/machines are right next to each other. And still we can't make the economics work. That's because the economics are a scam. Trade deals, subsidized shipping, state sponsorship from China. You can't compete on wages when everything is asymmetrical.
That's not the primary problem. The primary problem is "customer service" and that means that there is NO middle market in anything.
There is cheap, high-volume crap optimized to the penny with no customer service and there is fully-custom, super expensive high end stuff with great customer service.
Fixing any complaint or fault is expensive if you're not in the high-volume camp. If you're in the high-volume camp you simply say "We'll comp you a new one" and you're done.
If you're in the low-volume camp, to fix things, you're rolling a human to make sure something is broken and worth fixing. With furniture, maybe you have to roll shipping. Then you have to do the fix. And then you have to roll it back. At the end, that's probably $500+ for furniture. If it's really bad, you're sending a whole new thing ($2K+). Did you make enough profit on your other sales to compensate for that?
This "missing middle" due to customer service is the bane of everything right now. It even infests high tech stuff like test instruments. There are $1K or less things with no customer service or $100K things with great customer service and excellent quality. However, the $5K-$10K things get squashed.
Same way that they pay less to send mail to the USA than people in the US pay to send mail domestically (but not the reverse); through treaties and long-standing trade agreements that provide opportunities for arbitrage by outsourcing things that developed countries don't necessarily want to be directly involved in. And that includes dealing with labour unions, if they become too militant or resistant to modernisation.
Unions are restricted to certain industries, and they are basically all controlled by the government, so that puts an upper limit on the amount of "trouble" in industrial relations. Much of the country is in a "developing" state, and there is competition for jobs in the cities. The pre-1980s weren't that long ago in the collective consciousness, and while policies and initiatives may have changed, the same people are in charge.
No. It means there is someone in China who is willing to do the work cheaper than someone in Europe. If you beleieve they should be paid more for the same work, then great give those people money so they have the option of saying no to the "explotative" work.
But the idea that other people should not have the job because it isn't fair, is what kids would these days call "peak white supremecy" [TM], i.e. Europeans don't have the right to a job any more than other people in the world do. Historically they've ensured this through colonialism and war -- everyone around the world has done that. Now because of technological advancement a poor villager in China has the opportunity to say yes I want to do this work and take that job away away from his European counterpart. Are they getting off worse than the Europeans? Absolutely but it is better than being even worse off. If you want higher wages for them pass a law that bans Europeans from doing the work and I promise you wages will rise in China.
> You can't compete on wages when everything is asymmetrical.
You can't because what a European worker demands from others around the world is more than what a Chinese worker demands. This is both in terms of relative purchasing power in the country, and between countries.
> No. Instead, from Antwerp it's shipped half-way across the planet to China. There it is sawed into boards, grinded, and shipped to Rotterdam, again crossing half the planet. Back in the Netherlands, they do some finishing touches like sawing custom sizes and applying polish.
Does any portion of the lumber remain in China for the Chinese market?
Like many things, this seems to reflect a difference in philosophy. Personal story:
I grew up poor, living on the cheapest possible option for everything, and no option at all for many things. Then I wasn't poor anymore. So I would spend time researching the absolute best toaster oven, say, reasoning that paying more would mean not having to worry about a toaster oven again in my life.
Later still, I got married to someone who grew up in Hong Kong, a city famously filled with tiny living spaces and street markets filled with goods from right across the border in China. Her philosophy, shaped by her upbringing, is that things are generally disposable. She will happily buy a $20 toaster oven from Walmart[0], and do so again whenever she decides it needs to be replaced. At $20 every three years, it would take several decades before she spent more than I did, and in the meantime maybe she has decided she wants different colors, or uses a toaster oven much less and doesn't even need one anymore.
While I look and see waste and a deleterious effect on the environment, she see flexibility and cost savings.
Back to the furniture: part of me wants to see if Ethan Allen is still making high-quality long-lasting furniture here in the USA, and buying a new couch there whatever it costs. Another part is on board with my wife's approach, which is pick the style of couch she wants, buy it cheaply, and just know it's going to need to be replaced in five years, but that's okay, because she'll want a different style then.
Tangential but I do the same with tools -- when I need something new I buy from Harbor Freight, and if I use it enough that I need to replace it I give myself permission to splurge on a nice version.
Most of the time I don't use it enough to replace.
Then again, my Mother (in her eighties) still has the same toaster she bought in the 1970's. Environmentally, we are a lot better off when durable goods really are durable.
It depends. Newer toasters can give you much better control over how toasted your bread is, or can toast pieces of bread much thicker than old ones (or bagels).
Having durable goods that really are durable does not prevent you from deciding you want to upgrade. You simply pass on the still working item to someone else.
It used to be pretty common for young couples starting out to be gifted an older washer and dryer (for example) from a relative and the relative would upgrade to something with more modern features without feeling wasteful.
There is an advantage on the high-end which is a) safer, b) higher functionality, and c) better customer service. The philosophy many follow is buy the cheap one of something, and once it breaks (from extensive usage), replace it with the high-end version.
This is a problem (like most environmental issues) that can be only solved by limiting people's freedom of choice through regulation / taxation so that buying low-quality junk becomes uneconomical or impossible.
The rich can afford to buy quality. The poor can eventually buy these quality products used when the rich decide they want a new one. It's insane how much quality furniture and electronics one can find used for a fraction of original price, little to no wear and exactly same value provided.
For some things, this works well; for others, not so much.
A lot of old furniture is in a style that people these days might find completely gaudy, for instance.
And old electronics, even if they're mint-condition, can be completely useless. What would I do with a portable Minidisc player, for instance? Or a Betamax VCR?
Can confirm that Ethan Allen is still selling decent, US made, furniture - though at high prices. We got a couch for an awkward sized space from Ethan Allen and were very happy with the shopping experience, installation, and the quality of the furniture.
The cost of curtains for non-standard sized windows is insane too. I just bought canvas and I'm hand-stitching my own. All the materials needed for a dozen windows, including the tools, comes out to less than two curtains made by somebody else. As a bonus, you get to learn a neat skill that carries over to other things.
They custom cut everything so odd shaped windows don't add a lot of cost, they quality is good, and they do in fact honor their warranty. I had someone destroy a blind and they still replaced it under warranty!
This begs the question: why are the windows non-standard sizes to begin with? As with most other things, a lot of problems are avoided by sticking with standards.
I went to a local Amish shop and it was $1000 for a beautiful queen frame.
Let’s just assume same shipping
Total: $1700 - $3600
Yes there’s increased cost, but if you’re already over the absolute base (mattress + frame) it’s worth it. For most people, I suspect spending the extra few hundred for very good quality is worth it. Often these can be resold and keep a decent margin (I mostly buy furniture used, but quality is expensive)
You'd think the mass-manufactured stuff could win on price, but it only did at a quality level so low that nobody bothers having anything that bad custom-made. Ended up going with some local shop, paid the tier-2 pricing, easily the best bang for the buck. The custom stuff we bought was barely more expensive than getting Ikea cabinets! And it fit perfectly to our floorplan, allowed some custom extras to make better use of space, was exactly the color we wanted, et c.
More generally, searching for solid wood furniture should turn up some high quality local options in most places. Here in Austin, that includes Amish Furniture, Furniture in the Raw, and a couple other places that I'm less familiar with.
When searching for new bookshelves, I was surprised to find there was not much correspondence between price and build quality. The $150 Kallax bookshelves from IKEA were made out of the same material as some $2700 Room & Board bookshelves I also liked: both were medium density fiberboard with a wood veneer. Maybe someone prefers the design of the R&B bookshelf, or maybe they like their choice of veneer better, but fundamentally these are very similar products with an 1800% price difference.
I suppose another thing you're buying is the notion of "Not IKEA", the sort of brand identification that is a luxury for certain kinds of people.
This is the part that annoys me, and has even prevented me from spending money at all. That cheap stuff exists, hey, there's a place for that. But then the expensive stuff is still garbage. Per a sibling comment, maybe it's different garbage of a higher quality, but garbage.
I particularly remember standing in a lighting store, looking to replace the piece of garbage that we accidentally bought and put over our kitchen table, and realizing that no matter how much I spent, it would all die in a year. Fancy LED strip lighting? Unmaintainable, unrepairable, unreplaceable.
So I bought a $25 extension cord with some light sockets on it and 5 LED bulbs and wrapped it around the old track. I would have spent maybe a grand on a light setup I could trust, but I trust nothing anymore. I've replaced 2 of them so far. 30 seconds, $5-ish. It's a hack, but it works.
I'm in the same place for furniture at this point. My expensive couch is breaking up years before I think it should and I'm not dropping another several grand on replacing it when I'm aware of no way to trust anyone at this point. I don't know what we are going to do, but it probably doesn't involve giving this industry any money.
That's exactly me. If I could actually trust the stuff to be of high quality, I have no qualms paying for that. But if I can't find out/research it well enough, then I'll stick to cheap stuff. I happen to like IKEA a lot and am also not prone to redecorate on a whim, so in the end it really doesn't matter, unless I can't find what I need at IKEA.
Why would you need to repair LED strip lighting? LEDs don't normally have a lifespan limit, or at least not one measured in months.
And all the LED lighting I've ever seen is repairable; you just need a soldering iron to do it. The individual LEDs are usually very easy to get access to.
"And all the LED lighting I've ever seen is repairable; you just need a soldering iron to do it"
That is not repairable.
Some of the ones I was looking at were so fancy that I wouldn't even guarantee that you could get them back together if you did take them apart, though. Wouldn't take much for those delicate plastic bits to break permanently.
>"And all the LED lighting I've ever seen is repairable; you just need a soldering iron to do it"
>That is not repairable.
Why not? What if something requires a screwdriver? I'd say that's not repairable either, by your definition, because it requires special tools.
If something can't be repaired realistically without destroying it (like a Microsoft Surface laptop), that's "not repairable". Needing a soldering iron is not a big deal.
It may be that you’re talking about LED strip meaning “flexible PCB with LEDs on it’s surface”, but OP is meaning “strip of LEDs permanently glued in to a larger piece”
Not that it matters, but Kallax isn't MDF. It's much lighter than that. Which is for the best, because MDF at those dimensions would weigh a ton. It's constructed just like a Lack table, which is essentially cardboard honeycomb between sheets of melamine. Mostly air.
It is mdf, very thin 3mm mdf on the sides with paper-like honeycomb inside. Plus enforced by pieces of chipboard in the high stress areas. That's why Ikea furniture is so light.
I've settled on just getting Ikea or used (and usually quite old) furniture for most things. To get consistently-better quality than Ikea, you have to go up to like 10x or more their price. There's a whole middle-range of furniture that's largely complete shit, as bad or (more often) worse than Ikea, but with massive mark-up. The market's super-weird.
I recommend being cautious. We recently bought a couple Hemnes dressers, which are solid wood mid-range furniture from Ikea. They're trash.
Nobody expects Ikea furniture to be great, but usually it's just cheap materials that assembly nicely but aren't necessarily that durable.
In this case, the wood was mostly okay, though several pieces were slightly warped, and after it was all put together more than half the drawers jam. Something is very wrong with their manufacturing tolerances.
It’s hard to believe but the walker edison brand of furniture sold online actually has solid wood options and is cheaper with better tolerances than ikea.
Ikea tolerances are indeed trash. I have the same hemnes dresser
I don't believe there's anyway that the paper-Ikea stuff was the same quality of the $2700 R&B bookshelf. Do you have any links? Having owned a lot of throwaway Ikea furniture in the past, I was pretty happy with some of my more recent R&B purchases and the quality is completely a different level (and from what I heard R&B that is getting less quality over the years), but it was still night and day better than the Ikea stuff I had.
Kallax is ridiculously expensive and you pay for the hip IKEA brand (yes, IKEA is fancy in many regards). Especially for a bookshelf, you can build it yourself way cheaper. Go to IKEA to get inspiration and to check how the fiberboards are put together to construct the furniture. Then you can go to a hardware store that sells fiberboards, cut to your size specifications. In many places you can ask them to cover specific edges too. You buy the screws, the door hinges etc.
A bookshelf is essentially four boards plus a few shelves themselves. Ridiculously easy to construct yourself out of boards and won't cost as much as a Kallax. Also IKEA is often not even using fiberboard but hollow cardboard like this https://www.ikea.com/de/de/images/products/lack-couchtisch-w...
Once you get some routine, it's no huge deal to build more stuff yourself. With my dad, we built all our kitchen furniture with MDF boards, 3D modeled in the SketchUp software by us for millimeter precision. And again, you can ask hardware shops to do a lot of stuff for you, like make curved cuts etc.
Couches are of course another deal totally. But shelves/cupboards/wardrobes are totally possible to build yourself.
Pretty much. Cheap engineered wood replacing increasingly expensive solid/hard wood that's not sustainable to harvest. I do notice the occasional better finish on 10x priced furniture, but seems like there's only so much wrapping veneers around particle board can be improved. Big fan of Ikea bringing cost down on steel furniture though.
It’s miserable because the price of furniture is actually quite high but availability of furniture-like products at places like Wayfair and Overstock makes you think it can be had for less. I recently had to fix a small two seat couch I bought, so I turned it over and it was entirely built out of plywood and staples. It was such a poor design that I can’t imagine why it cost $450. But to be fair, a good quality couch of that same look would cost me about 7-10x as much which I wasn’t willing to spend so…
i'd imagine at least half of that is shipping and handling and import duties. tack on retailer margin and that seems about right. couches don't exactly flat-pack.
i do a lot of sleeping on my couches so i've always had extremely sturdy units, even when i was sort of poor. i went from extremely cheap ikea metal frame futons to a pretty legitimate solid wood couch when i got my first job.
The truth is most anything of quality is unaffordable to most people. People are so used to cheap, imitation versions of things that they are blown away at the prices of quality goods. People are shocked when they find out a quality front door costs $3,000 and can go way higher, for example. Most people don't realize it but most homes are made out of cheap materials today or a lack of expensive materials. How many houses do you see with no windows on the side?!
If you shop for quality furniture you will pay many thousands for quality couches that are well constructed from furniture grade wood. Proper joints cost a lot more than screws holding things together. Don't even get me started on rugs!
If you're looking for high quality things, it's worth checking out the second hand market. Often these items were well cared for and you can get really nice things if you do the legwork.
My problem - and that of many - with buying furniture is that of _precarity_.
If I knew I would be living in the same apartment or house for the rest of my life, or at least several decades - I would take the time and spend the money to get high-quality, long-lasting items. But - I don't own a home; tenants have close to zero rights in most places I've lived; my job isn't stable either - I might get fired or the business might go south, forcing me to move for another reason. So even the _time_ investment, ignoring the money, often doesn't make sense. If I could be sure the next tenant, or the landlord, would buy decent furniture off my hands at a decent price, I might still do it - but often you can sell your second-hand items even at a fraction of their cost, and have to just give it away.
So, even though I hate the IKEA-style rickety woodchip/papier-mache furniture, I've ended up buying more than a bit of it for some of the 6 rental apartments I've lived in over the past decade or so. Of course I try to keep existing furniture when I move in, if it's not too sorry of a sight; and I opt for better quality second-hand over crappy first-hand. But that means it's hella difficult to get materials and colors to match.
North Carolina person here and yes, all of that going to mexico/elsewhere did lower the quality of everything, as well as the expectation that furniture should be cheap.
Highpoint now has a furniture market without much production.
Since people here probably have the means, sharing some tips - If you want good solid-wood hand-built furniture in the US, a couple suggestions might be https://roomandboard.com/ - which is a frontend on a lot of small makers and has extremely good delivery fees, or finding a local (perhaps modern) furniture store that deals with smaller USA-made companies (like American Leather is pretty good for couches/chairs or Copeland for case goods). Regardless of what you do, often there's a bit of an ordering delay - sometimes up to 3-6 months, but it's always worth it than the obvious online options.
You may also have some nearby stores that sell Amish-made wooden furniture, particular in terms of kitchen tables and casegoods, and the quality is usually exceptional.
But yeah, stop ordering cheap MDF-stuff and then maybe factories will start producing good stuff in volume again, for a slightly higher price. Maybe.
I don't understand why a lot of people go through the sort of run-around described in many of these articles. If you order furniture and it doesn't show up on time, you give them a hard deadline of a week or so to get it to you or give you a refund. If they don't cooperate, you charge it back on your credit card. If you order furniture and it shows up damaged/missing pieces/broken/etc., you call them once and tell them to make it right. If they don't immediately give an acceptable response, you tell them that they'll make it right or you'll charge it back. If they don't make it right, you charge it back.
The only thing you have to keep in mind is the 60 day limit that most CCs have on chargebacks. Since furniture sometimes takes a while to be delivered, you just need to be sure to initiate the chargeback on day 59 if there are any issues remaining. You can always withdraw it, but as soon as that clock runs out, your leverage is gone (you can still go to court, but the threat of a chargeback is a better one because it's so easy for you to do any costs nothing).
Assertiveness against shitty people and shitty businesses isn't widespread behavior. It's why door-to-door or phone sales tactics, and car sales, all work pretty well. Largely psychological tricks to play on agreeableness.
I'd also bet a solid 90% of CC holders couldn't tell you how long their chargeback time limit is. People have lots of stuff to worry about, and those kinds of things don't always make the cut.
We can be part of the solution! Remind your friends of their options, help put them in contact with good info and when needed lawyers, and on occasion help them file the right complaints. This is a good case for "be the change you want to see in the world".
> If you order furniture and it shows up damaged/missing pieces/broken/etc., you call them once and tell them to make it right. If they don't immediately give an acceptable response, you tell them that they'll make it right or you'll charge it back. If they don't make it right, you charge it back.
Oh yeah, it's definitely annoying, but I would say generally less likely to be annoying to try buying from a new business than to continue dealing with one that has already treated you badly.
are you claiming the system is working just fine...we just have to spend some amount of our lives combating overt fraud and just sucking up the general level of poor quality that isn't strictly fraudulent
What is the alternative you're suggesting. I'm saying that it is inevitable in life that when dealing with businesses, you'll end up in bad situations. It sucks, but the point is that you have relatively straightforward recourse, which is good. I encourage you to try to improve the whole system, but I don't know how to do that, so I'll use the tools I have.
First you seem to say it's unrealistic for consumers to be expected to charge back their credit card if they're defrauded and a better system needs to be found. Ok, I'm listening. I agree it sucks to have to deal with this stuff on your own. I don't really understand who else is going to do that, and what realistic measures could be taken to stop this kind of bad behavior without grinding all commerce to a halt. I'm definitely open to ideas though.
Second you say your solution to the problem is to make your own furniture? As if people for whom filing a credit card chargeback would be a burden have the time or skill to build all their own furniture from scratch?
no. I think you're all getting screwed. that's my solution. I certainly don't think it scales, but this works much better for me. I'm really sick of ordering stuff expecting it to be reasonable and have to return it, or throw it out, or try to make do.
I'm just objecting to your statement that 'everything is just fine'. its not.
Can you check out of every similar interaction? You mention downthread that you make your own furniture, so don't have to deal with this particular situation. Can you see that that's not a scalable solution for every person and every product or service? If so, then you can empathize with the commenter you replied to.
I think he's saying consumers need to actually hold sellers accountable for not following through. Though this is arguably one of the biggest reasons market capitalism often gives us poor results. People tolerate too much, are gullible, and/or have too little time/money to hold business accountable.
I have ordered furniture from a catalog that took months to arrive, due to importing delays. They would have gladly given me my money back at any point. I just wouldn’t have decent furniture at a decent price I wanted.
I'm willing a lot of these stories stem from covid times. I had to literally wait like 10 months for some high-end furniture to arrive. Was worth it in the end, but was pretty obvious early on what was out of the retailer hands regarding supply chain issues and such.
Is it just that the same high quality costs more, but that cheaper is available and people are price-sensitive?
It wasn't obvious from the article but I got a few paragraphs in until the US-made graph and stopped there because it was a lot of human interest stuff and I couldn't extract value.
One of the advantage I got for coming back near my hometown is that:
- I know a farmers shed where I can store my stuff for free and build furniture even when the weather is shitty,
- I know the sawmill where I can find cheap but good quality wood/planks
- I have access to my father's festools, paint, sewing and over lock machine, as well as his expertise,
- I have access to metal drill/mills (sorry if a specific term exist) if I need a specific shape for basically free.
I know those advantages are fromy social class too, 90% of the people I've met in college won't have access to that, it's coming from the blue collar 'red and black' culture of sharing the mean of production and popular education where your most important professional skill is how to pass/share knowledge.
I'm currently using an ~80-year-old bedroom set. It's been moved ~7 times, and is still rock solid. It ain't new, nor trendy, nor did I ever get the thrill of shopping & buying exactly what I wanted - it's a hand-me-down from an aunt & uncle (who were born ~1895, if I recall). Back in the day, that's what families did with good furniture.
Physically, I'd guess that my bedroom set would be good for another 120 years or so. But since the younger generations, these days, are mostly set on buying all-new stuff for themselves, no matter the quality...
The younger generations are absolutely not set on buying all-new stuff. Go in a thrift store and nearly everyone shopping there is younger than 35. Craigslist is much more popular among younger people.
The reason younger people end up buying shitty, disposable furniture is because they can't afford houses.
I am not sure about your idea here, I'm under 35, own my home, and insist on buying second hand furniture for vastly different reasons. I scour craiglist, thrift stores, and my local flea markets for vintage furniture, and have almost entirely furnished my small 2 bedroom house over the last 6 years. A big part of this simply deals with build quality and real wood. I know furniture built before 1980 tends to be real wood, and I'd much rather have solid wood construction over particle board nonsense that won't last 10 years.
My searching and insistence has required a lot of patience, but it's ultimately been worth it for me. My holy grail was a 1970's Danish Teak dining room table (w/ 8 chairs!) that someone locally was selling for $800. Anything modern that's of comparable quality would easily be well above $2500. As of now, almost everything in my house is from the 1960/70s, and made of real wood. I'm willing to spend the money on these things instead of junk from Wayfair.
> the younger generations, these days, are mostly set on buying all-new stuff for themselves
I'd have happily accepted some heirloom furniture from my relatives if they'd passed away around when I brought my house.
But before you own a home you've got nowhere to store an inherited bedroom set - and after you get your first home you'll want a bedroom set immediately so you can move in.
I think for most families it's not a matter of failing to appreciate quality furniture, it's just very rare for the logistics to line up.
My parents had a microwave growing up that was older than I am. I'm in my 40s. It was an absolute tank. It still works today.
I used to say "they don't make 'em like that anymore", which is true, but then I thought about all the other furniture they bought in the 70s that did not survive this long. When I looked around their house, I saw that very little furniture or appliances were original. Most of it had broken and been replaced.
I realized I was looking at that microwave and drawing the conclusion that it was the rule when it was actually the exception.
What usually gets forgotten in the "they don't make 'em like that anymore" is the price. We had a microwave in the 80s that was built like a tank, and it cost about 4x what a microwave costs today. In absolute dollars that is. About 10x the price adjusted for inflation.
It's the same as the old washers & dryers from the 50s. It was pretty normal to spend $500 for a set. No wonder they were built like tanks. For that kind of money they needed to last decades.
I still remember our first VCR. It was a beast. $700, about 1980. Insane.
Part of what's changed, is that moving out of multigenerational households has become the norm in the US. Can't take mom and dad's furniture while they still need it.
You seem to have no problem with the looks of it though, people don't want "trendy" but maybe just don't like a certain color or style at all. Also when did you come into possession of that bedroom set? Was it your first interior after moving out? A common theme is people wanting to decorate their place how they like it, if it's the first time. I suppose I could do with my parent's bedroom and living room decor NOW, after not living with it for over 15 years, but I surely didn't when I got my own first apartment. (If I had gotten the house including everything in it I would've probably not downright replaced everything, but mostly due to costs)
At the end of the day most of the moderately priced furniture from IKEA is actually pretty good. When looking for some new living room chairs we visited 2-3 local furniture stores first, and gave up and went to IKEA after suffering through a miserable shopping experience.
Sure, IKEA may not have furniture that is going to last you 20+ years, but at least you know you'll get a fairly standard base level of quality for the price.
Who knows what you're going to get from Wayfair. It's all just random imports with no real way to figure out what level of quality you are paying for.
I came to the same conclusion. The article explains why small-scale U.S. furniture businesses must court designers, and the customers who employ them. It explains essentially what we all know: You can't build furniture at-scale with U.S. wages. I'd be curious to know how a robotic factory for mass-producing furniture would be able to compete with overseas salaries.
You absolutely can build competitive furniture products at US wages. Companies that outsource overseas might only be seeing a 5% greater margin, but it's enough to move production because that's money that goes straight to the executives.
I don't know about furniture, but in my industry where we have mechanical and electronic stuff built both domestically and in china, the difference in pricing is _insane_. It's not uncommon for things to be a difference of 10x, or 1000% more expensive to be built in the US.
And it's not like these shops in the US are swimming in cash. The infrastructure (for manufacturing) sucks and the labor is much more expensive. And frankly the quality has been slipping a lot too, Chinese stuff is now often overall better quality at a fraction the cost.
Perhaps if you are a megacorp and can arrange economical supply lines and leverage economies of scale, you can get down to small differences. But for small to medium production runs, China is just so overwhelmingly dominant.
You can’t build -cheap- furniture at scale with US wages.
It is only relatively recently that furniture became cheap. Historically it was expensive, and it was built to last, and it was handed down between generations. Furniture-as-fashion is a fantastic way to go broke, and hugely wasteful.
Furniture in the old days was like cars: a way to show off. (Rich) people would have their guests tour their homes so they could show off all the expensive, hand-made custom furniture.
I, too, just buy Ikea and used turn-of-the-(20th)-century furniture (I'd prefer mid-century, but so would everyone else, so it's too expensive).
The stuff at other major chain furniture stores, or sold at Wal-Mart or Target (or Big Lots, as in the article), is indeed so low-quality that it's basically just a scam. Usually ugly as sin for no good reason, too.
I suppose. I'm on an Ikea couch right now and happy with it. My wife built our hutch, floor to ceiling bookcase, etc out of planed white deal (spruce) and I like it. A kreg jig and mitre saw do wonders.
Buying new furniture, with some exceptions, is a wasteful use of money.
Especially often wasteful is unrepairable, landfill-destined IKEA.
If you want durable furniture that retains value, invest in (likely used) fine furniture. In terms of usability, doesn't matter where it comes from, so long as it does its job. For resale value, brand matters unless an item is obviously well-crafted.
Durable goods are cheaper when not paying for initial depreciation.
I'm not sure why you think that Ikea furniture is not repairable. It is repairable. There may be some challenges depending on the damage, though. I repaired it many times over the years when I was moving around EU. And it also lasts tens of years for me.
Arguably, highly repairable. Lots of spares, lots of ikea-hacking guides, and the low cost and middling materials mean there isn't a ton of risk.
Replacing my DIY "lack rack" would literally cost $20 + a couple bucks worth of screws & brackets. Replacing my teak sideboards if my drill slipped would be... unpleasant.
Yes I couldn't really understand what the thesis was. Definitely the shift to overseas production has affected local manufacturing, a story we have seen over and over.
But the consumers are unhappy because... It is cheaper? And $reasons? It's not like there isn't quality furniture available, they talk a lot about it. It is just more expensive than people want to pay given the cheaper alternatives available. So from a consumer angle, what's the problem really?
Lacking is any sort of inflation/quality adjusted comparison of prices from "ye goode olde days" vs now. That's really what I want to know, has it gotten both more expensive and worse? Or only cheaper and worse?
That would fit in the category of the cheap crap that people want to be able to do better than. For the most part. Ikea has some randomly good stuff but... yeah... mostly not.
Ikea's wood is actual garbage. Anything of theirs that is made of metal is pretty solid, especially if you apply some Loctite.
As a comparison, a drink spilled on a wooden end table ended up absorbing it, swelling and warping. Then I left one of their indoor metal-frame couches outside for a couple years and it's only now starting to rust.
Their plastic-and-metal chairs seem to be the best of all worlds except comfort. They survive heavy use by children, so it suits my needs.
I think there might be two or three bottom tiers at Ikea. The absolute cheapest poor quality junk, you get what you pay for. Then up there somewhat reasonable stuff. Not best, not worst. And here you end up paying more for same or the cheaper stuff in other places.
this might sound socialist. but the truth is the stuff you get for free is generally older and higher quality. so in the spirit of competition - why wouldn't you optimize for quality and price
"...but the real reckoning came almost as soon as the ink dried on the 1999 trade agreement the United States signed with China. Wages were so cheap there that (aided by the occasional World Trade Organization violation) Chinese companies could import U.S. lumber and ship the final product back by the container load and still sell their goods for less than U.S. companies paid in material costs."
It's easy to skim over this section without realizing how insane this is. Example: my brother works in the wood industry for a company producing wooden floors based in the Netherlands.
They source the wood from a production forest in Belgium. From Belgium's Antwerp harbor it would be an extremely short route to Rotterdam, after which the wood can be processed.
No. Instead, from Antwerp it's shipped half-way across the planet to China. There it is sawed into boards, grinded, and shipped to Rotterdam, again crossing half the planet. Back in the Netherlands, they do some finishing touches like sawing custom sizes and applying polish.
Can you fucking believe this? We're talking about trees here, they're absurdly heavy. They're making a full round trip across the planet. Whilst 75% of the work on those trees is machine-based.
The trees and the people/machines are right next to each other. And still we can't make the economics work. That's because the economics are a scam. Trade deals, subsidized shipping, state sponsorship from China. You can't compete on wages when everything is asymmetrical.
We just don't care enough. The amount of apathy the average person in a developed country has for the rest of their fellow man is astounding if you stop and think about it for a bit. People love to go on and on about how capitalism is good and paying them pennies isn't exploitation, we're lifting countries up into the "first world" and that's true to an extent, while conveniently ignoring that the countries being lifted up are either suffering for it themselves or are just shifting the exploitation farther down the line. Eventually we're gonna run out of people to shit on in order to make our lifestyles possible, and that's when it'll get interesting.
I've already written about this before on here so I'll just plop that down instead of rehashing it more:
I've read that there is a certain number of people that we're basically optimized to coexist within a societal structure, and modern civilization passed that a long time ago, and human beings in general just aren't capable of empathy on the scale of modern civilization. And I mean, it makes sense when you think about it. On some abstract level you have to know that even meagre standards of living in western society requires someone, somewhere to be suffering to provide it. $1 for a pound of bananas shipped from across the world before they even have a hint of yellow on them? That shit don't come without a cost, and our $1 sure as hell aint paying it. But we all just kind of don't think those people just to get through the day, because dwelling on the extent of suffering and horror we've wrought upon our fellow man in pursuit of whatever fresh hell the guys over at Oreo have managed to shape into the general form of a cookie would leave us a broken shell of a person and unable to show up for our next shift at the Big Mac factory.
"We just don't care enough. The amount of apathy the average person in a developed country has for the rest of their fellow man is astounding if you stop and think about it for a bit."
I wasn't going for that angle. I wasn't talking about the labor part. I accept that labor competes internationally. I have no moral right to a higher pay for the same work.
That's not the issue. The issue is that it shouldn't be possible to ship an oak tree across the entire planet for practically nothing. The true cost is not nothing, it has to be enormous. The "natural" pricing is heavily distorted by subsidies, trade deals, lack of taxation, dismissing all externalities, state sponsorship, the like.
None of this has anything to do with fair competition based on labor. It's a rigged game.
You see this all the time in the US.
I can get an item shipped to me from China on Aliexpress for a few cents or even free. The same package shipped to me from my own city costs several dollars.
Business interest in the US totally screw over local producers and few politicians seem to care.
>it shouldn't be possible to ship an oak tree across the entire planet for practically nothing
Why not? Modern lumber carrier vessels are massive. Optimizing for maritime bulk cargo transport to ship across world economically vs western wages seems very feasible.
Is it also possible that there isn't much competing cargo from Belgium back to China? If not for tree trunks, the ships/trains go back empty?
But globally poverty has been radically decreasing over the last few decades (although perhaps not so much since 2020). For example in 2010: “Globally, poverty is about a quarter of what it was in 1990” from https://www.humanprogress.org/five-graphs-that-will-change-y... . That is an old article but the trend of reduction in poverty continued from 2010 to 2020. Note much of that reduction is due to China, and Africa hasn’t improved as much.
Well, it's insane. But I'm sure I can think of hundreds of other equally insane things.
What can I do about any of them? Very little if I reject society, live in a cave and forage for berries. Also very little if I attempt to enter politics, even if moderately successful.
So I buy the fair trade bananas - for all the good that'll do - and try to tolerate all the madness.
> The trees and the people/machines are right next to each other. And still we can't make the economics work. That's because the economics are a scam. Trade deals, subsidized shipping, state sponsorship from China. You can't compete on wages when everything is asymmetrical.
That's not the primary problem. The primary problem is "customer service" and that means that there is NO middle market in anything.
There is cheap, high-volume crap optimized to the penny with no customer service and there is fully-custom, super expensive high end stuff with great customer service.
Fixing any complaint or fault is expensive if you're not in the high-volume camp. If you're in the high-volume camp you simply say "We'll comp you a new one" and you're done.
If you're in the low-volume camp, to fix things, you're rolling a human to make sure something is broken and worth fixing. With furniture, maybe you have to roll shipping. Then you have to do the fix. And then you have to roll it back. At the end, that's probably $500+ for furniture. If it's really bad, you're sending a whole new thing ($2K+). Did you make enough profit on your other sales to compensate for that?
This "missing middle" due to customer service is the bane of everything right now. It even infests high tech stuff like test instruments. There are $1K or less things with no customer service or $100K things with great customer service and excellent quality. However, the $5K-$10K things get squashed.
> still sell their goods for less than U.S. companies paid in material costs
I don’t get how this part is possible. How are the Chinese paying less than the Americans for imported wood?
Same way that they pay less to send mail to the USA than people in the US pay to send mail domestically (but not the reverse); through treaties and long-standing trade agreements that provide opportunities for arbitrage by outsourcing things that developed countries don't necessarily want to be directly involved in. And that includes dealing with labour unions, if they become too militant or resistant to modernisation.
Do Chinese companies have less trouble with labor unions? I thought communists are all about that stuff
Unions are restricted to certain industries, and they are basically all controlled by the government, so that puts an upper limit on the amount of "trouble" in industrial relations. Much of the country is in a "developing" state, and there is competition for jobs in the cities. The pre-1980s weren't that long ago in the collective consciousness, and while policies and initiatives may have changed, the same people are in charge.
This is a _very_ funny question
Why not? They call themselves communist but are pretty aggressively capitalist in most ways...
State manipulation of the market.
> That's because the economics are a scam.
No. It means there is someone in China who is willing to do the work cheaper than someone in Europe. If you beleieve they should be paid more for the same work, then great give those people money so they have the option of saying no to the "explotative" work.
But the idea that other people should not have the job because it isn't fair, is what kids would these days call "peak white supremecy" [TM], i.e. Europeans don't have the right to a job any more than other people in the world do. Historically they've ensured this through colonialism and war -- everyone around the world has done that. Now because of technological advancement a poor villager in China has the opportunity to say yes I want to do this work and take that job away away from his European counterpart. Are they getting off worse than the Europeans? Absolutely but it is better than being even worse off. If you want higher wages for them pass a law that bans Europeans from doing the work and I promise you wages will rise in China.
> You can't compete on wages when everything is asymmetrical.
You can't because what a European worker demands from others around the world is more than what a Chinese worker demands. This is both in terms of relative purchasing power in the country, and between countries.
> No. Instead, from Antwerp it's shipped half-way across the planet to China. There it is sawed into boards, grinded, and shipped to Rotterdam, again crossing half the planet. Back in the Netherlands, they do some finishing touches like sawing custom sizes and applying polish.
Does any portion of the lumber remain in China for the Chinese market?
No. The trees are owned by the Dutch company and they don't have a license to sell there. The customers of the end product are all in western Europe.
Like many things, this seems to reflect a difference in philosophy. Personal story:
I grew up poor, living on the cheapest possible option for everything, and no option at all for many things. Then I wasn't poor anymore. So I would spend time researching the absolute best toaster oven, say, reasoning that paying more would mean not having to worry about a toaster oven again in my life.
Later still, I got married to someone who grew up in Hong Kong, a city famously filled with tiny living spaces and street markets filled with goods from right across the border in China. Her philosophy, shaped by her upbringing, is that things are generally disposable. She will happily buy a $20 toaster oven from Walmart[0], and do so again whenever she decides it needs to be replaced. At $20 every three years, it would take several decades before she spent more than I did, and in the meantime maybe she has decided she wants different colors, or uses a toaster oven much less and doesn't even need one anymore.
While I look and see waste and a deleterious effect on the environment, she see flexibility and cost savings.
Back to the furniture: part of me wants to see if Ethan Allen is still making high-quality long-lasting furniture here in the USA, and buying a new couch there whatever it costs. Another part is on board with my wife's approach, which is pick the style of couch she wants, buy it cheaply, and just know it's going to need to be replaced in five years, but that's okay, because she'll want a different style then.
0. Literally, $19.96! https://www.walmart.com/ip/Mainstays-4-Slice-Toaster-Oven-Bl...
Tangential but I do the same with tools -- when I need something new I buy from Harbor Freight, and if I use it enough that I need to replace it I give myself permission to splurge on a nice version.
Most of the time I don't use it enough to replace.
Then again, my Mother (in her eighties) still has the same toaster she bought in the 1970's. Environmentally, we are a lot better off when durable goods really are durable.
It depends. Newer toasters can give you much better control over how toasted your bread is, or can toast pieces of bread much thicker than old ones (or bagels).
Having durable goods that really are durable does not prevent you from deciding you want to upgrade. You simply pass on the still working item to someone else.
It used to be pretty common for young couples starting out to be gifted an older washer and dryer (for example) from a relative and the relative would upgrade to something with more modern features without feeling wasteful.
There is an advantage on the high-end which is a) safer, b) higher functionality, and c) better customer service. The philosophy many follow is buy the cheap one of something, and once it breaks (from extensive usage), replace it with the high-end version.
This is a problem (like most environmental issues) that can be only solved by limiting people's freedom of choice through regulation / taxation so that buying low-quality junk becomes uneconomical or impossible.
The rich can afford to buy quality. The poor can eventually buy these quality products used when the rich decide they want a new one. It's insane how much quality furniture and electronics one can find used for a fraction of original price, little to no wear and exactly same value provided.
For some things, this works well; for others, not so much.
A lot of old furniture is in a style that people these days might find completely gaudy, for instance.
And old electronics, even if they're mint-condition, can be completely useless. What would I do with a portable Minidisc player, for instance? Or a Betamax VCR?
> 0. Literally, $19.96! https://www.walmart.com/ip/Mainstays-4-Slice-Toaster-Oven-Bl...
It's a really good toaster, surprisingly. Still going strong for me, even after 4 years.
There is an electric kettle in the same brand series, also very good. I still use it several times a day.
>While I look and see waste and a deleterious effect on the environment, she see flexibility and cost savings.
It IS bad for the environment if she's tossing the toaster oven in the trash bin every time she wants one with a different color.
However, if she's giving the old one away to someone who will use it, this is a very different matter.
Can confirm that Ethan Allen is still selling decent, US made, furniture - though at high prices. We got a couch for an awkward sized space from Ethan Allen and were very happy with the shopping experience, installation, and the quality of the furniture.
The other advantage of this approach is - if that $20 toaster actually lasts long, and if you don't want a new style, you're ahead by a huge margin!
The cost of curtains for non-standard sized windows is insane too. I just bought canvas and I'm hand-stitching my own. All the materials needed for a dozen windows, including the tools, comes out to less than two curtains made by somebody else. As a bonus, you get to learn a neat skill that carries over to other things.
For reference:
https://www.theartfulsailor.com/catalogue/the-sailmakers-app...
Same for blinds. Priced something out recently for 1 square window and it was $400.
I don't like to shill companies here, but I've used these guys a few times:
https://www.selectblinds.com/
They custom cut everything so odd shaped windows don't add a lot of cost, they quality is good, and they do in fact honor their warranty. I had someone destroy a blind and they still replaced it under warranty!
Definitely glad you shared
This begs the question: why are the windows non-standard sizes to begin with? As with most other things, a lot of problems are avoided by sticking with standards.
They were old and the builder got them for free from someone. I'd rather have these tbh, adds character.
I can’t recommend amish furniture enough.
Solid wood, highly customizable, built to pass down.
In terms of cost, you can look at getting a queen mattress
From mattress firm most people will be spending $500 - $1800 https://www.mattressfirm.com/search?q=Queen
From ikea your probably going to get a decent frame $500
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/hemnes-bed-frame-black-brown-lo...
Neither of those include shipping, so let’s assume another $200
Total: $1200 - $2300
If you get the Amish bedrame you’re talking maybe $1000 - $1600 https://www.dutchcrafters.com/Bed-Headboards/cat/776#1-731
I went to a local Amish shop and it was $1000 for a beautiful queen frame.
Let’s just assume same shipping
Total: $1700 - $3600
Yes there’s increased cost, but if you’re already over the absolute base (mattress + frame) it’s worth it. For most people, I suspect spending the extra few hundred for very good quality is worth it. Often these can be resold and keep a decent margin (I mostly buy furniture used, but quality is expensive)
I was really surprised, when we re-designed our kitchen, that the price tiers for cabinets were basically, lowest to highest:
1) Very-bad premade, 2) mid-range custom made(!!!), 3) mid-range premade (worse than tier 2 on quality), 4) high-end custom made, 5) high-end premade.
You'd think the mass-manufactured stuff could win on price, but it only did at a quality level so low that nobody bothers having anything that bad custom-made. Ended up going with some local shop, paid the tier-2 pricing, easily the best bang for the buck. The custom stuff we bought was barely more expensive than getting Ikea cabinets! And it fit perfectly to our floorplan, allowed some custom extras to make better use of space, was exactly the color we wanted, et c.
More generally, searching for solid wood furniture should turn up some high quality local options in most places. Here in Austin, that includes Amish Furniture, Furniture in the Raw, and a couple other places that I'm less familiar with.
When searching for new bookshelves, I was surprised to find there was not much correspondence between price and build quality. The $150 Kallax bookshelves from IKEA were made out of the same material as some $2700 Room & Board bookshelves I also liked: both were medium density fiberboard with a wood veneer. Maybe someone prefers the design of the R&B bookshelf, or maybe they like their choice of veneer better, but fundamentally these are very similar products with an 1800% price difference.
I suppose another thing you're buying is the notion of "Not IKEA", the sort of brand identification that is a luxury for certain kinds of people.
This is the part that annoys me, and has even prevented me from spending money at all. That cheap stuff exists, hey, there's a place for that. But then the expensive stuff is still garbage. Per a sibling comment, maybe it's different garbage of a higher quality, but garbage.
I particularly remember standing in a lighting store, looking to replace the piece of garbage that we accidentally bought and put over our kitchen table, and realizing that no matter how much I spent, it would all die in a year. Fancy LED strip lighting? Unmaintainable, unrepairable, unreplaceable.
So I bought a $25 extension cord with some light sockets on it and 5 LED bulbs and wrapped it around the old track. I would have spent maybe a grand on a light setup I could trust, but I trust nothing anymore. I've replaced 2 of them so far. 30 seconds, $5-ish. It's a hack, but it works.
I'm in the same place for furniture at this point. My expensive couch is breaking up years before I think it should and I'm not dropping another several grand on replacing it when I'm aware of no way to trust anyone at this point. I don't know what we are going to do, but it probably doesn't involve giving this industry any money.
That's exactly me. If I could actually trust the stuff to be of high quality, I have no qualms paying for that. But if I can't find out/research it well enough, then I'll stick to cheap stuff. I happen to like IKEA a lot and am also not prone to redecorate on a whim, so in the end it really doesn't matter, unless I can't find what I need at IKEA.
Why would you need to repair LED strip lighting? LEDs don't normally have a lifespan limit, or at least not one measured in months.
And all the LED lighting I've ever seen is repairable; you just need a soldering iron to do it. The individual LEDs are usually very easy to get access to.
"LEDs don't normally have a lifespan limit"
So the theory goes. The reality does not agree.
"And all the LED lighting I've ever seen is repairable; you just need a soldering iron to do it"
That is not repairable.
Some of the ones I was looking at were so fancy that I wouldn't even guarantee that you could get them back together if you did take them apart, though. Wouldn't take much for those delicate plastic bits to break permanently.
>"And all the LED lighting I've ever seen is repairable; you just need a soldering iron to do it"
>That is not repairable.
Why not? What if something requires a screwdriver? I'd say that's not repairable either, by your definition, because it requires special tools.
If something can't be repaired realistically without destroying it (like a Microsoft Surface laptop), that's "not repairable". Needing a soldering iron is not a big deal.
It may be that you’re talking about LED strip meaning “flexible PCB with LEDs on it’s surface”, but OP is meaning “strip of LEDs permanently glued in to a larger piece”
Not that it matters, but Kallax isn't MDF. It's much lighter than that. Which is for the best, because MDF at those dimensions would weigh a ton. It's constructed just like a Lack table, which is essentially cardboard honeycomb between sheets of melamine. Mostly air.
It is mdf, very thin 3mm mdf on the sides with paper-like honeycomb inside. Plus enforced by pieces of chipboard in the high stress areas. That's why Ikea furniture is so light.
These ikea pieces are great because you can hack them with other things and get something useful out of them.
Thank god for that design. Moving ikea stuff around is a breeze.
I've settled on just getting Ikea or used (and usually quite old) furniture for most things. To get consistently-better quality than Ikea, you have to go up to like 10x or more their price. There's a whole middle-range of furniture that's largely complete shit, as bad or (more often) worse than Ikea, but with massive mark-up. The market's super-weird.
I recommend being cautious. We recently bought a couple Hemnes dressers, which are solid wood mid-range furniture from Ikea. They're trash.
Nobody expects Ikea furniture to be great, but usually it's just cheap materials that assembly nicely but aren't necessarily that durable.
In this case, the wood was mostly okay, though several pieces were slightly warped, and after it was all put together more than half the drawers jam. Something is very wrong with their manufacturing tolerances.
It’s hard to believe but the walker edison brand of furniture sold online actually has solid wood options and is cheaper with better tolerances than ikea.
Ikea tolerances are indeed trash. I have the same hemnes dresser
I don't believe there's anyway that the paper-Ikea stuff was the same quality of the $2700 R&B bookshelf. Do you have any links? Having owned a lot of throwaway Ikea furniture in the past, I was pretty happy with some of my more recent R&B purchases and the quality is completely a different level (and from what I heard R&B that is getting less quality over the years), but it was still night and day better than the Ikea stuff I had.
Kallax is ridiculously expensive and you pay for the hip IKEA brand (yes, IKEA is fancy in many regards). Especially for a bookshelf, you can build it yourself way cheaper. Go to IKEA to get inspiration and to check how the fiberboards are put together to construct the furniture. Then you can go to a hardware store that sells fiberboards, cut to your size specifications. In many places you can ask them to cover specific edges too. You buy the screws, the door hinges etc.
A bookshelf is essentially four boards plus a few shelves themselves. Ridiculously easy to construct yourself out of boards and won't cost as much as a Kallax. Also IKEA is often not even using fiberboard but hollow cardboard like this https://www.ikea.com/de/de/images/products/lack-couchtisch-w...
Once you get some routine, it's no huge deal to build more stuff yourself. With my dad, we built all our kitchen furniture with MDF boards, 3D modeled in the SketchUp software by us for millimeter precision. And again, you can ask hardware shops to do a lot of stuff for you, like make curved cuts etc.
Couches are of course another deal totally. But shelves/cupboards/wardrobes are totally possible to build yourself.
Pretty much. Cheap engineered wood replacing increasingly expensive solid/hard wood that's not sustainable to harvest. I do notice the occasional better finish on 10x priced furniture, but seems like there's only so much wrapping veneers around particle board can be improved. Big fan of Ikea bringing cost down on steel furniture though.
It’s miserable because the price of furniture is actually quite high but availability of furniture-like products at places like Wayfair and Overstock makes you think it can be had for less. I recently had to fix a small two seat couch I bought, so I turned it over and it was entirely built out of plywood and staples. It was such a poor design that I can’t imagine why it cost $450. But to be fair, a good quality couch of that same look would cost me about 7-10x as much which I wasn’t willing to spend so…
Everything at "Rooms to Go" is built this way now. Didn't used to be, so we returned as customers.
The front cross-beam on a $1000+ couch of ours split in half within a few months.
The front cross-beam? The single most structurally-important part in the couch? That is telling.
i'd imagine at least half of that is shipping and handling and import duties. tack on retailer margin and that seems about right. couches don't exactly flat-pack.
i do a lot of sleeping on my couches so i've always had extremely sturdy units, even when i was sort of poor. i went from extremely cheap ikea metal frame futons to a pretty legitimate solid wood couch when i got my first job.
I think a lot of it is margin. There is a furniture company where I live that advertises a 45% off as an employee discount perk.
I’ve seen employee discounts usually priced at cost plus 5%.
The truth is most anything of quality is unaffordable to most people. People are so used to cheap, imitation versions of things that they are blown away at the prices of quality goods. People are shocked when they find out a quality front door costs $3,000 and can go way higher, for example. Most people don't realize it but most homes are made out of cheap materials today or a lack of expensive materials. How many houses do you see with no windows on the side?!
If you shop for quality furniture you will pay many thousands for quality couches that are well constructed from furniture grade wood. Proper joints cost a lot more than screws holding things together. Don't even get me started on rugs!
If you're looking for high quality things, it's worth checking out the second hand market. Often these items were well cared for and you can get really nice things if you do the legwork.
My problem - and that of many - with buying furniture is that of _precarity_.
If I knew I would be living in the same apartment or house for the rest of my life, or at least several decades - I would take the time and spend the money to get high-quality, long-lasting items. But - I don't own a home; tenants have close to zero rights in most places I've lived; my job isn't stable either - I might get fired or the business might go south, forcing me to move for another reason. So even the _time_ investment, ignoring the money, often doesn't make sense. If I could be sure the next tenant, or the landlord, would buy decent furniture off my hands at a decent price, I might still do it - but often you can sell your second-hand items even at a fraction of their cost, and have to just give it away.
So, even though I hate the IKEA-style rickety woodchip/papier-mache furniture, I've ended up buying more than a bit of it for some of the 6 rental apartments I've lived in over the past decade or so. Of course I try to keep existing furniture when I move in, if it's not too sorry of a sight; and I opt for better quality second-hand over crappy first-hand. But that means it's hella difficult to get materials and colors to match.
North Carolina person here and yes, all of that going to mexico/elsewhere did lower the quality of everything, as well as the expectation that furniture should be cheap. Highpoint now has a furniture market without much production.
Since people here probably have the means, sharing some tips - If you want good solid-wood hand-built furniture in the US, a couple suggestions might be https://roomandboard.com/ - which is a frontend on a lot of small makers and has extremely good delivery fees, or finding a local (perhaps modern) furniture store that deals with smaller USA-made companies (like American Leather is pretty good for couches/chairs or Copeland for case goods). Regardless of what you do, often there's a bit of an ordering delay - sometimes up to 3-6 months, but it's always worth it than the obvious online options.
You may also have some nearby stores that sell Amish-made wooden furniture, particular in terms of kitchen tables and casegoods, and the quality is usually exceptional.
But yeah, stop ordering cheap MDF-stuff and then maybe factories will start producing good stuff in volume again, for a slightly higher price. Maybe.
I don't understand why a lot of people go through the sort of run-around described in many of these articles. If you order furniture and it doesn't show up on time, you give them a hard deadline of a week or so to get it to you or give you a refund. If they don't cooperate, you charge it back on your credit card. If you order furniture and it shows up damaged/missing pieces/broken/etc., you call them once and tell them to make it right. If they don't immediately give an acceptable response, you tell them that they'll make it right or you'll charge it back. If they don't make it right, you charge it back.
The only thing you have to keep in mind is the 60 day limit that most CCs have on chargebacks. Since furniture sometimes takes a while to be delivered, you just need to be sure to initiate the chargeback on day 59 if there are any issues remaining. You can always withdraw it, but as soon as that clock runs out, your leverage is gone (you can still go to court, but the threat of a chargeback is a better one because it's so easy for you to do any costs nothing).
Assertiveness against shitty people and shitty businesses isn't widespread behavior. It's why door-to-door or phone sales tactics, and car sales, all work pretty well. Largely psychological tricks to play on agreeableness.
I'd also bet a solid 90% of CC holders couldn't tell you how long their chargeback time limit is. People have lots of stuff to worry about, and those kinds of things don't always make the cut.
We can be part of the solution! Remind your friends of their options, help put them in contact with good info and when needed lawyers, and on occasion help them file the right complaints. This is a good case for "be the change you want to see in the world".
> If you order furniture and it shows up damaged/missing pieces/broken/etc., you call them once and tell them to make it right. If they don't immediately give an acceptable response, you tell them that they'll make it right or you'll charge it back. If they don't make it right, you charge it back.
Then repeat. Sounds like a pain to me.
Oh yeah, it's definitely annoying, but I would say generally less likely to be annoying to try buying from a new business than to continue dealing with one that has already treated you badly.
are you claiming the system is working just fine...we just have to spend some amount of our lives combating overt fraud and just sucking up the general level of poor quality that isn't strictly fraudulent
I'm checking out. you enjoy that.
Could you please review the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and use HN in the intended spirit? Note these ones:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
"Don't be snarky."
"Edit out swipes."
What is the alternative you're suggesting. I'm saying that it is inevitable in life that when dealing with businesses, you'll end up in bad situations. It sucks, but the point is that you have relatively straightforward recourse, which is good. I encourage you to try to improve the whole system, but I don't know how to do that, so I'll use the tools I have.
I make my furniture...and its exactly now nice I want it. sorry that doesn't work for you.
I'm struggling to understand this.
First you seem to say it's unrealistic for consumers to be expected to charge back their credit card if they're defrauded and a better system needs to be found. Ok, I'm listening. I agree it sucks to have to deal with this stuff on your own. I don't really understand who else is going to do that, and what realistic measures could be taken to stop this kind of bad behavior without grinding all commerce to a halt. I'm definitely open to ideas though.
Second you say your solution to the problem is to make your own furniture? As if people for whom filing a credit card chargeback would be a burden have the time or skill to build all their own furniture from scratch?
no. I think you're all getting screwed. that's my solution. I certainly don't think it scales, but this works much better for me. I'm really sick of ordering stuff expecting it to be reasonable and have to return it, or throw it out, or try to make do.
I'm just objecting to your statement that 'everything is just fine'. its not.
I imagine most people don’t have the time, space, or skill to do this.
Can you check out of every similar interaction? You mention downthread that you make your own furniture, so don't have to deal with this particular situation. Can you see that that's not a scalable solution for every person and every product or service? If so, then you can empathize with the commenter you replied to.
I think he's saying consumers need to actually hold sellers accountable for not following through. Though this is arguably one of the biggest reasons market capitalism often gives us poor results. People tolerate too much, are gullible, and/or have too little time/money to hold business accountable.
Deterimined commercial abusers know how to delay, lie and deflect . It is a daily occurrence.
I have ordered furniture from a catalog that took months to arrive, due to importing delays. They would have gladly given me my money back at any point. I just wouldn’t have decent furniture at a decent price I wanted.
I'm willing a lot of these stories stem from covid times. I had to literally wait like 10 months for some high-end furniture to arrive. Was worth it in the end, but was pretty obvious early on what was out of the retailer hands regarding supply chain issues and such.
Is it just that the same high quality costs more, but that cheaper is available and people are price-sensitive?
It wasn't obvious from the article but I got a few paragraphs in until the US-made graph and stopped there because it was a lot of human interest stuff and I couldn't extract value.
One of the advantage I got for coming back near my hometown is that:
- I know a farmers shed where I can store my stuff for free and build furniture even when the weather is shitty,
- I know the sawmill where I can find cheap but good quality wood/planks
- I have access to my father's festools, paint, sewing and over lock machine, as well as his expertise,
- I have access to metal drill/mills (sorry if a specific term exist) if I need a specific shape for basically free.
I know those advantages are fromy social class too, 90% of the people I've met in college won't have access to that, it's coming from the blue collar 'red and black' culture of sharing the mean of production and popular education where your most important professional skill is how to pass/share knowledge.
But still, I have great furniture.
Vs. the Good Old Days...
I'm currently using an ~80-year-old bedroom set. It's been moved ~7 times, and is still rock solid. It ain't new, nor trendy, nor did I ever get the thrill of shopping & buying exactly what I wanted - it's a hand-me-down from an aunt & uncle (who were born ~1895, if I recall). Back in the day, that's what families did with good furniture.
Physically, I'd guess that my bedroom set would be good for another 120 years or so. But since the younger generations, these days, are mostly set on buying all-new stuff for themselves, no matter the quality...
The younger generations are absolutely not set on buying all-new stuff. Go in a thrift store and nearly everyone shopping there is younger than 35. Craigslist is much more popular among younger people.
The reason younger people end up buying shitty, disposable furniture is because they can't afford houses.
I am not sure about your idea here, I'm under 35, own my home, and insist on buying second hand furniture for vastly different reasons. I scour craiglist, thrift stores, and my local flea markets for vintage furniture, and have almost entirely furnished my small 2 bedroom house over the last 6 years. A big part of this simply deals with build quality and real wood. I know furniture built before 1980 tends to be real wood, and I'd much rather have solid wood construction over particle board nonsense that won't last 10 years.
My searching and insistence has required a lot of patience, but it's ultimately been worth it for me. My holy grail was a 1970's Danish Teak dining room table (w/ 8 chairs!) that someone locally was selling for $800. Anything modern that's of comparable quality would easily be well above $2500. As of now, almost everything in my house is from the 1960/70s, and made of real wood. I'm willing to spend the money on these things instead of junk from Wayfair.
Seems like GP's point doesn't apply to you?
They are saying that young people would choose to buy vintage furniture if they could afford it.
You are saying that you choose to buy vintage furniture because you like it and can afford it.
> the younger generations, these days, are mostly set on buying all-new stuff for themselves
I'd have happily accepted some heirloom furniture from my relatives if they'd passed away around when I brought my house.
But before you own a home you've got nowhere to store an inherited bedroom set - and after you get your first home you'll want a bedroom set immediately so you can move in.
I think for most families it's not a matter of failing to appreciate quality furniture, it's just very rare for the logistics to line up.
My parents had a microwave growing up that was older than I am. I'm in my 40s. It was an absolute tank. It still works today.
I used to say "they don't make 'em like that anymore", which is true, but then I thought about all the other furniture they bought in the 70s that did not survive this long. When I looked around their house, I saw that very little furniture or appliances were original. Most of it had broken and been replaced.
I realized I was looking at that microwave and drawing the conclusion that it was the rule when it was actually the exception.
What usually gets forgotten in the "they don't make 'em like that anymore" is the price. We had a microwave in the 80s that was built like a tank, and it cost about 4x what a microwave costs today. In absolute dollars that is. About 10x the price adjusted for inflation.
It's the same as the old washers & dryers from the 50s. It was pretty normal to spend $500 for a set. No wonder they were built like tanks. For that kind of money they needed to last decades.
I still remember our first VCR. It was a beast. $700, about 1980. Insane.
Part of what's changed, is that moving out of multigenerational households has become the norm in the US. Can't take mom and dad's furniture while they still need it.
You seem to have no problem with the looks of it though, people don't want "trendy" but maybe just don't like a certain color or style at all. Also when did you come into possession of that bedroom set? Was it your first interior after moving out? A common theme is people wanting to decorate their place how they like it, if it's the first time. I suppose I could do with my parent's bedroom and living room decor NOW, after not living with it for over 15 years, but I surely didn't when I got my own first apartment. (If I had gotten the house including everything in it I would've probably not downright replaced everything, but mostly due to costs)
At the end of the day most of the moderately priced furniture from IKEA is actually pretty good. When looking for some new living room chairs we visited 2-3 local furniture stores first, and gave up and went to IKEA after suffering through a miserable shopping experience.
Sure, IKEA may not have furniture that is going to last you 20+ years, but at least you know you'll get a fairly standard base level of quality for the price.
Who knows what you're going to get from Wayfair. It's all just random imports with no real way to figure out what level of quality you are paying for.
I decided a long while back to never spend another dollar on garbage furniture like Ikea.
Furniture is something worth spending some money on.
Look around auctions and second hand stores for nice stuff at lower prices.
A friend of mine made https://feasier.io/ to try to at least make the search process easier. It's hard to get users, though.
It seems fine to me?
I came to the same conclusion. The article explains why small-scale U.S. furniture businesses must court designers, and the customers who employ them. It explains essentially what we all know: You can't build furniture at-scale with U.S. wages. I'd be curious to know how a robotic factory for mass-producing furniture would be able to compete with overseas salaries.
You absolutely can build competitive furniture products at US wages. Companies that outsource overseas might only be seeing a 5% greater margin, but it's enough to move production because that's money that goes straight to the executives.
I don't know about furniture, but in my industry where we have mechanical and electronic stuff built both domestically and in china, the difference in pricing is _insane_. It's not uncommon for things to be a difference of 10x, or 1000% more expensive to be built in the US.
And it's not like these shops in the US are swimming in cash. The infrastructure (for manufacturing) sucks and the labor is much more expensive. And frankly the quality has been slipping a lot too, Chinese stuff is now often overall better quality at a fraction the cost.
Perhaps if you are a megacorp and can arrange economical supply lines and leverage economies of scale, you can get down to small differences. But for small to medium production runs, China is just so overwhelmingly dominant.
You can’t build -cheap- furniture at scale with US wages.
It is only relatively recently that furniture became cheap. Historically it was expensive, and it was built to last, and it was handed down between generations. Furniture-as-fashion is a fantastic way to go broke, and hugely wasteful.
Furniture in the old days was like cars: a way to show off. (Rich) people would have their guests tour their homes so they could show off all the expensive, hand-made custom furniture.
I, too, just buy Ikea and used turn-of-the-(20th)-century furniture (I'd prefer mid-century, but so would everyone else, so it's too expensive).
The stuff at other major chain furniture stores, or sold at Wal-Mart or Target (or Big Lots, as in the article), is indeed so low-quality that it's basically just a scam. Usually ugly as sin for no good reason, too.
You might have different (er, lower) standards for quality.
I suppose. I'm on an Ikea couch right now and happy with it. My wife built our hutch, floor to ceiling bookcase, etc out of planed white deal (spruce) and I like it. A kreg jig and mitre saw do wonders.
Buying new furniture, with some exceptions, is a wasteful use of money.
Especially often wasteful is unrepairable, landfill-destined IKEA.
If you want durable furniture that retains value, invest in (likely used) fine furniture. In terms of usability, doesn't matter where it comes from, so long as it does its job. For resale value, brand matters unless an item is obviously well-crafted.
Durable goods are cheaper when not paying for initial depreciation.
I'm not sure why you think that Ikea furniture is not repairable. It is repairable. There may be some challenges depending on the damage, though. I repaired it many times over the years when I was moving around EU. And it also lasts tens of years for me.
Arguably, highly repairable. Lots of spares, lots of ikea-hacking guides, and the low cost and middling materials mean there isn't a ton of risk.
Replacing my DIY "lack rack" would literally cost $20 + a couple bucks worth of screws & brackets. Replacing my teak sideboards if my drill slipped would be... unpleasant.
I think a lot of the buying experience is made miserable by sales people, just the same as in car dealerships.
I wonder if that is why Ikea is so popular. You get the time to look.
What a completely bizarre story and comments.
“Unnecessary lifestyle goods are hard to buy for people who struggle with agency. Market capitalism has failed!”
This is truly one of those first world tinniest violin problems.
Yes I couldn't really understand what the thesis was. Definitely the shift to overseas production has affected local manufacturing, a story we have seen over and over. But the consumers are unhappy because... It is cheaper? And $reasons? It's not like there isn't quality furniture available, they talk a lot about it. It is just more expensive than people want to pay given the cheaper alternatives available. So from a consumer angle, what's the problem really?
Lacking is any sort of inflation/quality adjusted comparison of prices from "ye goode olde days" vs now. That's really what I want to know, has it gotten both more expensive and worse? Or only cheaper and worse?
Doesn't America have Ikea shops? I mean… you get what you pay for, and it's durable enough…
That would fit in the category of the cheap crap that people want to be able to do better than. For the most part. Ikea has some randomly good stuff but... yeah... mostly not.
Ikea's wood is actual garbage. Anything of theirs that is made of metal is pretty solid, especially if you apply some Loctite.
As a comparison, a drink spilled on a wooden end table ended up absorbing it, swelling and warping. Then I left one of their indoor metal-frame couches outside for a couple years and it's only now starting to rust.
Their plastic-and-metal chairs seem to be the best of all worlds except comfort. They survive heavy use by children, so it suits my needs.
I think there might be two or three bottom tiers at Ikea. The absolute cheapest poor quality junk, you get what you pay for. Then up there somewhat reasonable stuff. Not best, not worst. And here you end up paying more for same or the cheaper stuff in other places.
Why support global capitalism by buying their overpriced furniture anyway? I get free furniture off Craigslist anytime I want it
this might sound socialist. but the truth is the stuff you get for free is generally older and higher quality. so in the spirit of competition - why wouldn't you optimize for quality and price
Don't let the bedbugs bite.
It is a real concern. I imagine you could heat treat the furniture to be safe.
I sometimes wonder whether the bedbug scare is a psyop by Big Furniture
Sounds like you are still supporting that global capitalism just second-hand and on the cheap.
Getting something for free from some rando not wanting to bother with emptying their apartment does not really fit into my mental model of capitalism.