201–210 of 762 posts
The key aspect that allows the businesses to get away with this is the buying frequency. You might buy a couch once every 10 years so it's very difficult to judge quality. Whereas with something like coffee beans I'm buying it every week so I have 52 opportunities every year to analyze the quality and change brand. The couch seller knows you probably won't make a repeat purchase so it's all about marketing tricks.
Despite the article mentioning other things, it seems like at least half the problem can be avoided by never buying furniture online.
Not really. Regular retailers aren’t immune. Let’s be real too: nobody’s going underneath the sofas at Crate and Barrel to see how they’re constructed. It doesn’t really matter that you can see and touch them. I don’t even think the luxury brands are much better (e.g., RH). They’ll give you some solid woods and finer materials where you can see them. They are better but not by the amount I would like. The cheapness i…
I also don't really know what to look for. Most people don't.
In the past you could more or less rely on the store being somewhat reliable and somewhat trustworthy. I say "somewhat" because of course you wouldn't fully trust a salesman, but by and large: you could more or less trust that something was "quality" if it was advertised as such, and/or more expensive and the cheaper options, usually. You didn't need to have a Ph.D. in sofa construction to buy a decent sofa.
Now it's best to assume everything is a lie. Everyone is lying to your face, or just don't know what the they're talking about. Even expensive items marketed as "quality" cannot be relied on being quality at all.
Once upon a time a sofa was a product sold on the market because some people needed sofas, and some people and/or companies knew how to make them. "A fair product for a fair market-conform price". Classic capitalism and free-market economics where everyone wins.
But now it no longer matters if people need sofas, or whether anyone actually gets anything remote to a "fair deal", or any externalities like climate change, or if kids in Vietnam are being exploited. Burn the world, as long as I can sell my crummy sofa, because "free market allows it" is the only logical and moral argument that exists for some people. A sofa is no longer a product; it's just the means to making a profit. There's a subtle difference between to two.
All of this is part of "the financialisation of everything" and "toxic capitalism" that's been going on since the 80s.
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>junk now being sold as luxury. That's always been the case though. There has always been junk marketing itself as "luxury" to milk the nouveau riche. It's not like real Coach bags utilize some magic leather that doesn't degrade just the same as the $200 leather purse you buy from a local artisan. It's not like the brick that Supreme sold was made of some sort of magical clay. The luxury purse companies don't burn th…
> degrade just the same as the $200 leather purse you buy from a local artisan. Where are there local artisans selling leather purses they made for $200? Are you sure you don't mean $4,000? Surely if you are buying a $200 hand made purse, it was made by hand in a low labor cost country and relabeled.
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Is it super heavy? I've noticed weight often equals how long something will last in good condition, and old furniture is often way heavier and bulkier.
That's because old furniture is usually made of heartwood and not the cheaper sapwood part of the tree; I like to call it cardboard furniture. Same goes for old wooden windows etc. that can last a hundred years or more if properly taken care of. "Heavy is good, heavy is reliable. If it doesn't work you can always hit them with it." — Boris 'The Blade' Yurinov
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Quality ain't cheap, and cheap ain't quality. In furniture, you definitely get what you pay for...or not. I've found anything Anything decent doesn't really start until ~$1k, and anything in the $3k range you mentioned starts to become heirloom quality. As with anything, these are YMMV, but serves as a fast basis for my experience
Unfortunately the premise of the article is that you can now easily drop $1k+ on a sofa that looks good on Instagram, but is constructed of particleboard and falls apart when you look at it sideways.
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As if it wasn't bad enough that most consumer goods have completely bifurcated into "junk" and "luxury", now it's hard to even tell which products fall into which category, because there is so much junk now being sold as luxury.
>junk now being sold as luxury. That's always been the case though. There has always been junk marketing itself as "luxury" to milk the nouveau riche. It's not like real Coach bags utilize some magic leather that doesn't degrade just the same as the $200 leather purse you buy from a local artisan. It's not like the brick that Supreme sold was made of some sort of magical clay. The luxury purse companies don't burn th…
In general though I agree with your point that it's possible to get the same quality as a luxury brand for cheaper, and luxury brands are about signalling, but it's a continuum. There are also plenty of "luxury" bag brands in the $200-500 range that use crummy leather and you'd be way better off with Coach (or a local artisan like you mentioned.)
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Are you not worried about bedbugs buying furniture off Facebook?
Or ghosts? I mean if the house it comes from is haunted maybe an evil spirit will migrate with it. You never know.
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>junk now being sold as luxury. That's always been the case though. There has always been junk marketing itself as "luxury" to milk the nouveau riche. It's not like real Coach bags utilize some magic leather that doesn't degrade just the same as the $200 leather purse you buy from a local artisan. It's not like the brick that Supreme sold was made of some sort of magical clay. The luxury purse companies don't burn th…
> It's not like real Coach bags utilize some magic leather that doesn't degrade just the same as the $200 leather purse you buy from a local artisan. Not sure why Coach was chosen for this example - I don't believe they are expensive; last I checked they were in the range of $200-500, which doesn't seem egregious as the actual luxury brands (ex. Hermes, where the entry level bags are $4,000). That said, I feel there…
Other brands are catching on. I hear Porsche (or at least some dealerships) have started gatekeeping 911s this way.
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Yeah. Even at the time we knew West Elm wasn't high end, but we were at least expecting decent. We know more now (and could afford better) whenever we have to finally replace this, but $2000 is a not-insignificant investment that shouldn't be a complete piece of crap.
My problem is that I don’t even know where to buy _good_ stuff. I don’t want to pay $5k for a couch, but maybe I will _once_ in N years, for some large N, if I know it’s very well made and I like the design. But I have no idea where to go for this. The overlap between junk and luxury is too large nowadays.
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IKEA is beloved by many in the US and generally one of the most specifically in-demand brands in the market for used contemporary furniture. You might just be in an unusual region or had some other reasons why your listings didn't perform the way you expected. That said, I am one of those people who doesn't get a lot from them so I can speak to some of criticism. Part of it is just the aesthetic, and theirs doesn't m…
> you discover that much of the cheapest stuff has the same flimsy glueboard, peeling laminate, and unstable joinery of the cheap stuff at Wal-mart. I'm not going to argue too much with this, but I think this is underselling Ikea quite a bit. Their cheap stuff is definitely made out of cheap materials. But I've found it to be well-engineered compared to walmart with reinforcements in critical places and general overa…