It’s Not Just Wayfair: Why Does ALL Of Your Furniture Fall Apart?
Interesting commentary on what happened to the furniture industry in the United States.
Because it was replaced by cheap garbage.
Saved you a click. The video was pretty informative though.
Everything is cheap garbage in the U.S. Except our healthcare, which is expensive, but also cheap garbage.
Cheap garbage is cheap garbage, no matter the price they expect you to pay for it.
Same reason everything sucks these days. Capitalism.
As a person who grew up in a socialist country, I say be careful what you wish for.
You have to be more precise than that.
Furniture was a “luxury” item. We had very a few and ugly options, produced by socialist / plan economy manufacturing industry. Quality wise these were meh… Even then one needed to jump through the hoops to buy the ugly and not very affordable furniture. Rumours about new batch coming to a local store and you have a long queue waiting for hours, sometimes days. Anything better imported from abroad, was super difficult to get hold of. Unless you’re a member of the socialist gov and have connections.
Good ANYTHING is hard to come by these days. It’s all fucking garbage.
A little rough around the details (pine is not a hardwood, and MDF and chipboard are just as heavy as wood), but yeah, generally this is spot on.
I will say that just at a design level, a single-pillar end table is never going to handle the sledgehammer test very well compared to a four-legged design, but once you’re through the initial clickbait moment, that old Ethan Allen piece is very much better made.
It’s not hard to find, it’s just expensive.
The United States still has a furniture industry?
Yes, but it’s expensive.
It’s odd because from what I can gather from things like youtube it seems like woodworking is huge there (and they say wood is cheap there too), so I’d imagine there should be a considerable amount of people doing furniture.
Contrasting to the situation here where people doing hand-maded furniture is lowering their prices so much trying to keep up with the ikea-type of shit (and of course doing things with superior quality).
My FiL made my dining room table. It’s ~600lbs and was $2K in material alone, that didn’t include any labor he didn’t charge us. It’s just about indestructible but it certainly would’ve been $4k-$5k if he was selling it. Would you buy that? I thought not. I certainly wouldn’t have.
I made my sons’ crib. Solid cherry, nothing crazy fancy but I like it. I wouldn’t make another to sell unless I get at least $5k for it. I doubt anyone would buy it for much more than $1k. Just not worth it.
