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Parable of the Sofa

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Re: Parable of the Sofa

#241

Post by codexb »

meristohm wrote: post #239

Title a play on Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower?[0] Other cultures don't use sofas, and I'm curious if they were originally a thing for royalty (like flat green lawns and white bread and so many other "luxuries" we royal Americans went in for), and I would vote for leaving ours (IKEA, so not the worst in terms of PFAS coating and other toxins, but also not great) with the house when/if we move, and sitting on t…

Wait, if other cultures don't use sofas, what do they sit on? Are their houses all full of single chairs?

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#242

Post by blfr »

ajkjk wrote: post #209
blfr wrote: post #163

> This kind of transaction is exactly what modern capitalism is trying to stamp out. Yet again modern capitalism is blamed for its users' lack of taste: people genuinely prefer new, crappier stuff to classier, old items. This is the same with Tik Tok algos, tailors being unpopular compared to fast fashion and even overpriced luxury brands, fast food vs cooking, etc. Virtually every time a consumer is confronted with…

> people genuinely prefer new, crappier stuff to classier, old items > Virtually every time a consumer is confronted with a lousier but easily available option and a vastly superior one but requiring some mental, or occasionally physical, effort, they choose the former. No they don't. There's a bunch of information asymmetries and missing choices that make the equilibrium warped and bizarre, rather than revealing any…

> There's a bunch of information asymmetries

This is what I meant by mental effort. With the advent of the Internet, most of these asymmetries are gated by at most a couple of hours of online research.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#243

Post by jprete »

photon_lines wrote: post #226
borski wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that sofas haven’t come down significantly in price. These shittier products aren’t actually much cheaper than, for example, a custom made sofa. I know this because I just bought a custom made sofa. But the quality is incomparable.

Yes but this is once again where the free-markets and economics come in: if the mass-produced ones match the custom-made ones in price, consumers will start switching to custom-made sofas. The mass-production suppliers will either have to 1) lower the price of their sofas or 2) increase the quality of production to match the quality of the custom-made ones. Both 1 and 2 are great for consumers and this is why competi…

This is a very theoretical argument but I don't think it happens that way in reality, because of all the ways that real human beings are not economically perfect agents. Particularly the information asymmetries - it's much harder to gauge the reputation of a small business vs. a big one.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#244

Post by salomonk_mur »

codexb wrote: post #241
meristohm wrote: post #239

Title a play on Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower?[0] Other cultures don't use sofas, and I'm curious if they were originally a thing for royalty (like flat green lawns and white bread and so many other "luxuries" we royal Americans went in for), and I would vote for leaving ours (IKEA, so not the worst in terms of PFAS coating and other toxins, but also not great) with the house when/if we move, and sitting on t…

Wait, if other cultures don't use sofas, what do they sit on? Are their houses all full of single chairs?

In the floor or a mat.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#245

Post by thrance »

buffalobuffalo wrote: post #235
thrance wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think North Korea was always an authoritarian state from the get go, it was built by the soviets over the ruins of the Korean war. It's just coated in a socialist paintjob just like many other dictatorships. You're right in that reverting to a previous system will always be a temporary solution, but I don't believe there is any perfect system able to endure until the end of times. "Do you want to live in North Kore…

Sure. I agree Many of those things would be a net benefit. So why don't we have them? It seems to me, the main reason is that representatives won't vote for them. Why not? Mainly because their financial and political incentives are structured in such a way that they can't. Why are these incentives like this? You can keep peeling back layers of the onion like this forever, but as some point you realize it's just due t…

Humm sure, I agree with most of what you said.

I want to believe we can have a better economic system, not necessarily capitalistic, maybe one where resource allocation is achieved more democratically.

Capitalism, with all its flaws, was still an improvement over feudalism. I refuse to believe it can't get any better.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#246

Post by ghaff »

alerighi wrote: post #230
Micoloth wrote: post #110

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…

> Yes fixing stuff is good for the planet. But big brands could offer customer service just fine if people wanted it. They could but they won't. Because they realized (and probably all agreed) that it's far more profitable to sell the customer a new product, rather than fixing the old one. And since they are the big brands, and they have practically a monopoly (think about big tech companies) they make the rules. The…

I must have hallucinated that I went to an auto dealer for warranty service last week.

Enterprise software companies have consulting and support services.

At the consumer level though, most people aren't willing to pay for the cost of the manufacturer or retailer repairing clothing and other relatively low cost items. As in this article, there are local businesses that do such things but it can be really hard to justify for lower cost items. I have had shoes resoled and otherwise repaired but haven't done it in years and probably most recently a pair of very expensive custom hiking boots that were made to be repairable. (And the repair was probably $200 or so.)

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#247

Post by seer »

istultus wrote: post #171

Let me posit an ad-hoc theory built on our anchoring bias in regards to price and our inability to think in terms of inflation/hyperbolic discounting: tl;dr - Once a cheap alternative is on the market, us frugal folks can't imagine paying for what was once the default and only option, distorting our understanding of what constitutes good quality * He says buying a new sofa of the same quality today would cost upwards…

I don't know why HN has the idea that IKEA is cheap trash - yes some of the things in their catalog are not very high quality, but they seem to be very consistent.

But more importantly (for me), because they have such a huge catalog, and a propensity to optimise, they ended up with a supremely hackable furniture - everything fits together with everything else, whenever you want to build something - there are tons of parts available - and you can buy just the parts its kinda like lego.

Also a lot of Ikea stuff is made of honeycomb paper - so it's trivial to put cables and electronics inside. I've hacked multiple tables and sofas by putting charging ports / wireless chargers and other doo-dads inside, vastly decreasing my cable management issues.

And again if anything breaks, its kinda trivial to fix it yourself, as you've probably assembled it and know where each bold and nail go.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#248

Post by drrotmos »

photon_lines wrote: post #218
beowulfey wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the article is that the big business model is "continued growth", which depends on constantly increasing sales, which means products necessarily get shittier so that they must be replaced more frequently. Small "lifestyle" businesses do not operate under this principle and encourage reuse and renewal. They represent opposing philosophies. Whether you can "just" get a sofa from big business or not, that i…

'The point of the article is that the big business model is "continued growth", which depends on constantly increasing sales, which means products necessarily get shittier so that they must be replaced more frequently.' - Sorry to interject here, but this is extremely wrong and nowhere did I find this take-away from the posted article. There are massive businesses that do sell extremely high-quality products - in fac…

> If you allow a person to buy a $800 sofa which looks great on the outside and is made in China albeit with extremely low quality materials vs. a sofa which looks almost exactly the same but is priced at $1500 but is of much higher quality - most consumers will obviously choose the $800 dollar sofa vs the $1500 since that's how the free-market functions. Is this rational though?

This is rarely the choice though. In my experience, the choices tend to be the $800 low quality sofa, the $3000 low quality but with a name brand sofa, and the $6000 low quality but with an even fancier name brand sofa.

Presumably there are some manufacturers that still produce furniture that's actually made of massive wood rather than cardboard and veneer, but it's becoming increasingly rare.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#249

Post by borski »

photon_lines wrote: post #226
borski wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that sofas haven’t come down significantly in price. These shittier products aren’t actually much cheaper than, for example, a custom made sofa. I know this because I just bought a custom made sofa. But the quality is incomparable.

Yes but this is once again where the free-markets and economics come in: if the mass-produced ones match the custom-made ones in price, consumers will start switching to custom-made sofas. The mass-production suppliers will either have to 1) lower the price of their sofas or 2) increase the quality of production to match the quality of the custom-made ones. Both 1 and 2 are great for consumers and this is why competi…

That’s not quite true, because many people don’t have good custom sofa makers near them. Moreover, because they are small businesses, they don’t have the same capacity for marketing as big brands; most of their business is word of mouth.

Also, custom sofas take time to build - not much, but 2-4 weeks or so.

So there are a lot of reasons big brands are convenient. But you pay for that convenience in quality.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#250

Post by ghaff »

salomonk_mur wrote: post #244
codexb wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, if other cultures don't use sofas, what do they sit on? Are their houses all full of single chairs?

In the floor or a mat.

Or wood stools/benches/chairs. Fabric was very expensive until relatively recently. A modern sofa would presumably have been an extreme luxury item not that long ago in historical terms.
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