121–130 of 357 posts
you can also have the leather refinished instead of replacing it. they fill the cracks etc and touch up the "paint". I like this look more but ymmv depending what is available near you
"So we had them replaced, at a fair price, by a small local business. Which is something that modern capitalism is trying to make impossible"
And then there was lot of blah-blah-blah about small local business which thanks to those "modern capitalism" is possible and exists. But what is "fair price" is still unknown from whose point of view it is fair.
So, let use the same style (it is the style, yeah):
If you want to rise popularity of your blog in many modern capitalism countries, always start any blog record with any form of modern capitalism blaming :)
Quality (or the lack thereof) as a hidden property seems to be a man-made artifact. Are there any examples in nature (excluding mankind) coming up with this? Evolution doesn't seem to choose this path. Why do we?
Plummage and other external indicators of fitness, which animals use to game the mating game? Still, nature is first and foremost red in tooth and claw. Fighting for survival has a magical ability to cut through all the bullshit and reveal things for what they are. Quality won't stay hidden for long if it's directly relevant to you eating your next meal, instead of becoming one. Related, I believe this is why humanit…
> pace of fraud
Isn't it if the stakes are high more eyes are watching and thus quality control works (better)? I'm at a loss for scenarios that would raise the bar for the sofa game. A shabby sofa could signal something about the owner that might be indirectly relevant to the mating success. But on the other hand there seems to be a niche for that market where low quality fits quite well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
r/K selection is about the tradeoff between quantity and quality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory
Quality of care is distinct from fitness (gene quality if you will). It seems like offspring without much care is more needy of fitness than K-strategists.
If you get out of the US bubble, the prices are simply insane fix a sofa: it's equivalent to a month's salary/stipend here in Asia. 200 bowls of noodle (if it's a cheap noodle then it's more like 500) new sofa: "new leather sofas of the “not flat-packed sawdust and glue” variety quickly get into five figures" So like a year's worth of stipend/expenses Could be that just the US dollar is crazy - but until the economic…
This whole idea of “most new furniture suddenly sucks in the past 15 years” is somewhat suspect to me. Maybe it’s survivorship bias or something? Because cheaply furniture definitely existed more than 15 years ago.
I found a vintage ad for a “genuine leather” sofa for $799. I.e., the worst kind of leather, the kind with the cracking plasticky texture. I don’t think that sofa would have even reached the upholstery guy, it would have ended up in a dumpster. (Search for Gardner White Vintage Ads on Google Images)
That $799 couch in 1990 would now cost $2,000 after inflation. So $2,000 is your baseline for a mass-produced cheap couch (this lines up pretty closely to the $1500 IKEA leather couch I own), which means something more “buy it for life” is going to bring you into that Restoration Hardware territory. And, really, most people aren’t willing to pay that.
The second thing I would say is that this idea that modern capitalism wants to stamp out this family business is not supported at all. This whole situation seemed to make their services even more valuable. It’s also a fact that in the US 99.9% of all businesses are small businesses and they employ almost half of all Americans. Yes, you heard that right, it’s really 99.9%.
Small businesses are where you’ll find a lot of quality furniture too! Like, you can buy solid wood furniture at good prices from Amish-owned furniture businesses.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/small-business-stati...
The third and final point I’d make is that particle board isn’t bad. That isn’t what causes your furniture to fail prematurely. And it has major benefits like being lightweight. My sofa from IKEA is 100% manufactured wood, but that part is totally solid. I’ve owned the couch for a good 10 years now. The weak points of the couch are really the foam, which you don’t really need a complicated upholstery job to replace. It may also even be possible for me to buy the cushion covers from IKEA directly (that’s certainly an option from modular manufacturers like LoveSac).
Every time I read takes like this I think people forget why big brands exist? Small business (or “lifestyle business”) vs big brand is often framed about being high quality vs cheap price, because in practice it often is. But in theory the two things are completely unrelated. Yes fixing stuff is good for the planet. But big brands could offer customer service just fine if people wanted it. Small business vs big brand…
> When I need a sofa, I want to be able to “just” get a sofa. Simple and predictable. If the sofa is good quality, even better. So, how often do you eat at McDo? (whose entire value proposition is "just" get some calories, simply and predictably)
Just because you want to "'just' get a sofa" it does not follow that you "'just' get some food" as well. Or at least not always: sometimes you may 'just' want to, and sometimes you'll want something more that 'just' calories.
And you may not care about sofas as compared to other things: you may 'just' want a sofa, but if you're really into cooking then you may want more than (say) 'just' some random knife, perhaps going for hand-forge Japanese steel.
Further, the cost of making a mistake with food (a few (dozen) dollars) versus a mistake with a sofa (hundreds/thousands) are on two different levels.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there are two issues that are going in parallel 1. fixing stuff As long as some dude on the other side of the world is willing to make a new sofa and send it to you for cheaper than it is to fix it locally, the idea of fixing it locally will just never take off. You can ban/limit international trade, but then you're just screwing over poor people on the other end of the world for a "feel good" kind of thing 2…
Ikea sofas can be underrated. My wife bought a Grönlid loveseat at a consignment store (read: it wasn't even new) for $100 and we enjoyed it for almost 9 years. No sagging or falling apart, it remained comfortable until the day we sold it or gave it away - I don't recall now.
If you get out of the US bubble, the prices are simply insane fix a sofa: it's equivalent to a month's salary/stipend here in Asia. 200 bowls of noodle (if it's a cheap noodle then it's more like 500) new sofa: "new leather sofas of the “not flat-packed sawdust and glue” variety quickly get into five figures" So like a year's worth of stipend/expenses Could be that just the US dollar is crazy - but until the economic…
A significant portion of the cost is labour, so if you translate that into a local non-US cost does it still seem absurd? I may have misunderstood your point, but I don't think it is a good argument for why running a business fixing things using local labour should be a fantasy. Aside from that, in my view a world where a sofa costs less than one weeks wages is the absurd and unsustainable one. We've adopted an attit…