I really love the recommended background music while reading this article. More blogs should adopt that - really quirky.
The Fancy Rug Dilemma
41–50 of 67 posts
Re: The Fancy Rug Dilemma
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Enshitification. It's where the price goes up, but the quality actually goes down.
I was thinking more of something like mechanical watches - more expensive than a quartz watch and less accurate.
Those are the same as fancy rugs. A machine will make better rugs, but you're paying for the artisanal story, or whatever your abstract value is.
Re: The Fancy Rug Dilemma
#43I always assumed that the rug shops were for money laundering.
Palo Alto may buy a lot of rugs, but it seems like one shop should be sufficient to supply the entire city.
Though now I am imagining Palo Alto rolling out its new, grand vision for commerce: to become the Rug Shop Capital of the Greater Bay Area. In cooperation with Stanford Business School's new program in Rug Store Management, and the department of Rug and Textile Studies.
Rug stores also seem to be perpetually "going out of business", but I don't know if this is actually the case and why.
Re: The Fancy Rug Dilemma
#44Interesting read, I'm surprised nobody has brought up Pejman Nozad who is the owner of one of the more popular rug shops. https://pear.vc/team/pejman-nozad/
His money doesn't come from the rug shops. He sells rugs, but the rug shop was where he used to meet investors and founders and make investments. I assume the rug shop in Menlo Park has a similar background.
Re: The Fancy Rug Dilemma
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Merging all the dimensions of the question into Value as a function of Cost seems part of the challenge. Value is such a subjective concept. You finally get down to "We all need things transcending pure utility, connecting us to stories bigger than ourselves." at the end of the post. Even if "bigger than ourselves" takes on some explicit religious angle--thinking the Amish here--there is still copious room to dislike…
I think part of the Amish line of thought is instead of randomly and quickly adopting technology/growth a community should take time to understand what the impacts are of using them. Some people think Amish don't use electricity, but that's not true. You'll find quite a few of them with things like solar panels and LED lights. These things tend to have very long lifespans and no grid connections limiting needs from o…
Indeed, and the infrastructure behind these are very communally owned.
I guess if the unit of group analysis stays small enough, they can avoid the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons .
Re: The Fancy Rug Dilemma
#46The idea of rugs as heritage and identity so thoroughly offends every anti-consumerist ideal I have that I find it impossible to take this author seriously. Please tell me this is satire?
Re: The Fancy Rug Dilemma
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Merging all the dimensions of the question into Value as a function of Cost seems part of the challenge. Value is such a subjective concept. You finally get down to "We all need things transcending pure utility, connecting us to stories bigger than ourselves." at the end of the post. Even if "bigger than ourselves" takes on some explicit religious angle--thinking the Amish here--there is still copious room to dislike…
I think part of the Amish line of thought is instead of randomly and quickly adopting technology/growth a community should take time to understand what the impacts are of using them. Some people think Amish don't use electricity, but that's not true. You'll find quite a few of them with things like solar panels and LED lights. These things tend to have very long lifespans and no grid connections limiting needs from o…
The Amish way is ultimately impractical to practice without being embedded in a society which is much larger and inimical to their own way of thinking as otherwise those willing to both bear the cost of accepting modern ways of and willing to do violence burn your shit and settle on your land. In more peaceful times people may chose only to impoverish your people and buy your lands but the net effect is the same.
The inherent built-in futility limits the virtue of this approach.
Re: The Fancy Rug Dilemma
#48Oddly enough, I know some of the long time rug sellers on University Ave and another without a storefront as a side business. Some of the vintage collectible ones go for $150k+.
I inherited my grandparent's 40-year-old Tibetan silk rug about 4x6m with a crazy dense weave. It's in storage, lol, because using it would wear it too much and sending it for cleaning it is a PITA. It's basically a white elephant item. I wished I had walls tall and long enough, because I'd consider framing it like a tapestry if direct sun wouldn't hit it.
Re: The Fancy Rug Dilemma
#49I can’t speak for the rugs you viewed, but some products take literally hundreds of man hours to make. My partner recently picked up some fine crochet bedspreads. These intricate bedspreads each must have consumed multiple weeks of labour. I understand this is also true of hand crafted Chinese and Afghan rugs - around a month per square metre for an Afghan. In contrast, those basketball shoes you collect are mass pro…
Mentioning the man hours would make sense, if the ones producing the product taking the majority cut from the purchase price. Otherwise, it's more of a strategy to set a higher price tag, and the reseller and all the middleman taking all the extra revenues.
Not really.
Irrespective of price, the inherent value of the rug is much greater - it still takes over 100x the labour to produce.
That it still costs less than 100x basketball shoes to purchase is more circumstantial, yet further demonstrates the fallacy of the argument.
Re: The Fancy Rug Dilemma
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Creating a single basketball shoe from an existing template takes three hours. Coming up with that design and all the associated expenses (marketing etc) plus the tooling needed to produce the shoe consumes much more labor and accounts for the vast majority of the shoe's cost. Hand-woven rugs, on the other hand, are largely unique in design and created by a single person.
Silk hand-woven rugs need no marketing at all in order to fetch absurdly large amounts of coins.
And yet, Steppenwolf was singing their praises in 1968. Bullfrog put out an well know advergame in 1994. Plenty of marketting of the properties of silk rugs through portrayals in popular media.