Parable of the Sofa • Hacker News Board

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#261

Post by timbray » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 4:18 PM UTC

drrotmos wrote: post #248

photon_lines wrote: post #218

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.' - 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…

A high-quality leather sofa these days is closer to $15K than $1500, ouch.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#262

Post by wholinator2 » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 4:19 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #246

alerighi wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 just…

While i do take your point, i think a big problem with discussions about "big businesses" is that they are completely different most of the time. A sofa =/= a car =/= enterprise software. But then how do discussions happen? A sofa is just a thing to sit on at home, you undoubtedly have other things to sit on. Needing to repair a sofa is not catastrophic to survival. Needing to repair a family car can be catastrophic to an individual or family. Needing to repair enterprise software can be catastrophic to a large business itself. There's hugely different consequence scales here, which i guess correlates with how willing a "large" company is to provide the desired support

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#263

Post by brewdad » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 4:21 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #246

alerighi wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 just…

At the consumer level it frequently doesn't make sense to repair an item. My son had a part fail on his luggage last winter. It might be covered under warranty (the manufacturer wouldn't commit until inspecting the product) but the repair would require shipping the suitcase to them and paying for return shipping. It was going to cost about $150 minimum to have it repaired on a piece that is already a decade old and could be replaced for $200 on sale. I have seen this repeated many times across products.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#264

Post by brewdad » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 4:22 PM UTC

bitnasty wrote: post #138

throw0101c wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, how often do you eat at McDo? 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)…

I think the point is that McDonald’s is literally all over the world, but that doesn’t mean the food is consistent.

McDonalds may have the most consistent food product in the world.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#265

Post by timbray » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 4:28 PM UTC

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…

You're right, but I didn't realize that till later. Except for the original "Parable of the Sower" was from Jesus not Olivia. But I also thought of Olivia's first.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#266

Post by brewdad » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 4:28 PM UTC

GeneralMaximus wrote: post #183

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…

> ... either people accept the fact that some neighbourhoods are served worse than others, or the take the car and make the travel up to the nice asian shop they read about on the internet, because that’s apparently worth it. What's better: having to do a few minutes of research to find a good sofa repair shop in your city or having to buy a new sofa every 5 years? Further: what's better for you personally, and what'…

When the sofa refurbisher can only handle 100 sofas a year, the 101st customer doesn't have any where to go. Perhaps the market will then lead a second refurbisher to set up shop but that only moves the constraint somewhere else in the supply chain. By its very nature, these small shops can never serve "everyone" the way the big box retailers and flat pack builders can. It's not really a solution to the problem at hand.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#267

Post by coldtea » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 4:28 PM UTC

nakedneuron wrote: post #212

coldtea wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have an idea of why this is. Because they are convenient examples of things everybody in their audience has seen and knows about, and are quite simple too? One could use dogs for example, to make somebody understand the Platonic Ideas (in this case, dogness), but they have a lot more aspects and variables than tables (even questions about unique personality and soul might creep in, whereas for tables it wont).

While this is true, there are billions of convenient examples everybody knows. Also there are things that have a lot less variables than a table. I'm not convinced. (I don't thing so.)

>While this is true, there are billions of convenient examples everybody knows.

Well, in those days they had a billion less examples than we have today - or at least tens of thousands of common today product categories and things not yet existing.

But they also used weaponry (Zeno on infinite division), chariots (Plato on soul), pots (Plato on art), caves (Plato on reality), dice (Heraclitus on chance), and many other things.

Plus, famous examples tend to be re-invoked (same how computer vision students re-used Lena).

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#268

Post by brewdad » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 4:29 PM UTC

mbravorus wrote: post #221

intended wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That said - VCs / PE are effectively in the business of outcompeting Lifestyle businesses.

Outcompeting? Hell no. Eliminating - sure.

It's the same thing when the outcome is that they "win".

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#269

Post by snowwrestler » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 4:32 PM UTC

parpfish wrote: post #136

I always thought “lifestyle business” meant something else. In this article it means “small business that supports the lifestyle of its owner/employees” I thought it meant that it was a business that provided a non-essential usually-trendy “lifestyle goods/accessories” for its customers.

This article is misusing the term. Every business supports the lifestyle of its employees, by providing them with money and (sometimes) benefits. But that doesn’t mean every business is a “lifestyle business.”

What makes a “lifestyle business” is that the owner picks the lifestyle they want first, then designs a business around that. For example someone who wants to go rock climbing all the time is not going to consider a furniture repair shop in a big city to be a “lifestyle business.” Probably few people would consider furniture repair to be a lifestyle business, unless your preferred lifestyle is to do manual labor in a crappy warehouse every day with few vacations.

Lifestyle businesses usually take one of a few shapes:

- Monetizing the lifestyle directly: for example Instagram influencers who make a business out of their personal travel, fashion, outdoor adventure, etc.

- Running a high-leverage business at a low intensity: for example a highly automated SaaS business that is kept small and easy to run, so the owner can spend most of their time doing other things. This is usually what VCs look down on, because they seek out high leverage business models and consider anything less than max intensity to be a wasted opportunity.

- Optional businesses: for example low-intensity “consulting” gigs that independently wealthy people operate to keep from being bored, or for tax advantage.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#270

Post by ric2b » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 4:32 PM UTC

bitnasty wrote: post #138

throw0101c wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, how often do you eat at McDo? 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)…

I think the point is that McDonald’s is literally all over the world, but that doesn’t mean the food is consistent.

It is remarkably consistent, tourists go to McD's very often when short on time because they know almost exactly what they’re getting, even though they might be a 10h flight from their home.