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Parable of the Sofa

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Re: Parable of the Sofa

#301

Post by refulgentis »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #95
refulgentis wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a motte and bailey here. Motte: "people tell me to go to North Korea for my idea that it should be illegal to make couches with the wrong joins, use license agreements, or air ads that don't match my eventual experience", Bailey: "I don't know what a join is, and I shouldn't need to" Again, I ask: What's actually being proposed here? If nothing, is this just white collar barroom conversation, via griping?

Setting aside my shock at you invoking motte-and-bailey here, given that I'd apply it to your counterargument first, here are some concrete proposals: - Ban most of the advertising as it's known today, recognizing it for the cancer on modern society that it is (see: [0]); - Make vendors pay for costs of disposal of their products; this would curtail the profitability of shit-tier products and planned obsolescence; -…

"Shock", my goodness.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#302

Post by photon_lines »

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…

I don't disagree with you - but this also explains the determining factor in which product wins and why today's markets or sofas are lower quality than they were 30+ years ago. If price doesn't matter - what's going to be the driving force in buying behavior? Consumer behavior in other words is no longer driven by quality or long-term cost: today, people will simply choose the lowest cost items and deal with the pain of having to replace it every X years. This drives the market to place a premium on what then? LOWEST COST. Lowest cost = the manufacturers that cut corners and reduce quality, so the market driving force (consumers) lead to a game where the lowest cost producers win and thus saturate the marketplace with junk.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#303

Post by kmoser »

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…

> Well - the consumer will need to buy 4 of the $800 dollar sofas just from having to replace them throughout a 20 year period vs. having the ability to buy one (the $1500) one

Even an $800 sofa will probably last much longer than five years. An added benefit to disposable items is that when you move and/or your tastes change, it's easier to abandon the old sofa and buy a new one than to take the old one with you. (With a little luck and perseverance you may even be able to recoup a few bucks by selling the old one.)

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#304

Post by jacobn »

A very big reason for the “go big or go home” mentality comes from very simple company valuation metrics:

If you have $10M ARR and modest growth you’re probably going to get a ~4x P/E valuation.

If you have $100M ARR and modest growth you can go public and get a ~20x P/E valuation.

So you’re not only 10x more valuable, you’re 50x more valuable.

Basically you get a massive multiplier boost on top of the increased scale.

(Rough & approximate, YMMV, etc)

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#305

Post by ghaff »

switch007 wrote: post #188
moffkalast wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Along the same line it's always interesting to see Americans discuss mattress prices, it's always like "yeah best pay 4-6k at least and they're swapping the names and reviews so there's no way to tell if you're getting a quality product regardless" meanwhile I paid like 250 euros for a locally made memory foam mattress that's a dream (ha) to sleep on. Post-socialist countries still have an absolute shit ton of these…

I feel the same when they talk about renovations. "thank god the kitchen only came to $45k", "the bathroom remodel was only $30k", "the new fence was $20k, not too bad". I know the have bigger spaces but... damn.

Though home renovation costs are mostly about local labor costs for tradesmen. I suppose I could spend an ungodly amount in a kitchen on super-premium appliances but more likely the bulk of the cost is masons, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, the local shop putting together the cabinets/counters/etc. You can also save a lot of money by being selective as opposed to hiring someone to do a complete makeover.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#306

Post by ghaff »

_nalply wrote: post #300

It's about incentives. One example: What if companies rented sofas instead of selling them? Perhaps a weird idea, but humour me. The incentives would shift. Companies would be more interested to give you durable sofas. Because there will be less profit if they have to replace sofas more often.

There are furniture rental places. They rent pretty much the cheapest crap they can get their hands on.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#307

Post by petesergeant »

seer wrote: post #247
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…

One nice thing about IKEA furniture is that the price of an item is well connected to its quality, and they offer items in a range of quality levels, so there’s a trustable signal in the price

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#308

Post by UltraLutra »

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…

[dead]

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#309

Post by crazygringo »

ric2b wrote: post #274
crazygringo wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a very "limited" warranty: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/files/pdf/40/04/4004a9de/seating_... If the sofa breaks , then sure it's covered. But it explicitly doesn't cover fabric or leather coverings -- and good luck trying to convince them that the foam padding has gone all flat. Whereas in my experience, how long a sofa lasts is determined precisely by how long the coverings and cushions last. (I've never in my l…

The stuff that isn't covered is the stuff that will naturally wear out with use and can be easily replaced, so I don't see the problem.

The point is cheap stuff wears out a lot more quickly, and it's not easy or cheap to replace fabric and padding, and may not even be financially worth it.

The point is that having a 10 year warranty doesn't mean your cheap sofa is going to last as long as an expensive one. It's not a signal at all that IKEA sofas are high quality.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#310

Post by losvedir »

I guess I don't take it for granted like in the article that replacing something is necessarily bad. What specifically is the metric that is bad here? Landfill space? Material waste? Ikea furniture is less dense so sort of wins here. Cost to the consumer? His original sofa is $5,000 in today's dollars. Will it last longer than multiple consecutive Ikea sofas? Recall that because of the time value of money, an Ikea sofa today is maybe $1,000 but a replacement 5 years from now is likely only to be "worth" $700 in today's money, and then one 5 years from then will be $500, and so on? So for $5,000 today you could have a "lifetime supply" of Ikea couches. Maybe the problem is carbon released in the manufacturing? I'm not sure an artisan making trips to a lumber supply store and making a couch a day wins out vs. an Ikea factory producing hundreds an hour supplied by ships and trains and trucks.

To the extent this raises a problem about capitalism, it's that increasingly price discovery doesn't work anymore. Competition has been the driver of efficiencies and progress for centuries, but it doesn't really work if every purchase you also have to go "but what about the carbon?" "what about the workers' conditions?" "what about the animal welfare?" "what about the landfills?". In other words, there are so many externalities conscientious consumers have to search the history of the company and rely on branding and marketing to make a decision. Many, like Mr Bray here, just throw their hands up and say the whole system is flawed.

Cheap things should be the goal. If we had a carbon tax, appropriate labor laws combined with tariffs or trade agreements, costs for landfill space or whatever, then you just need to buy the cheapest thing and that will be the most efficient!

I know I personally tried to live this philosophy 10 years ago when I purchased a $400 pair of handcrafted boots (trying to follow Vimes's philosophy), and I regret it. They've not held up well, though at least I was able to re-sole them at a cobbler here in town.

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