I'd highly recommend finding a local shop for furniture, if you can. You're right that the major brands cost a lot of money for quality, so even if a local place seems pricier than an "economy" couch at Ikea or West Elm, you're getting a much better piece of furniture.
Unaffiliated plug, but there is a sofa shop in the Castro in SF (I think they also have a location in the East Bay) where we bought our new couch a couple years ago. The brothers who own the business were very patient about explaining the different kinds of cushion materials and how we could expect them to wear, let us take home several books of fabric swatches to compare within our own home (for days!), and told us if we didn't like the feet once it got to our place they would switch them out for free. Needless to say, that buying experience is completely different from a corporate store.
It only wound up costing 10-20% more than the similar couches we were evaluating at retail shops and has been so much more comfortable and so much more durable than the furniture we ever bought from those places. They've got an outstanding warranty, so we know if we ever did experience unexpected wear and tear they would replace it immediately, and that if 5 or 10 years from now we want to refresh the cushion they can help us with that too.
Just like that small software startup is beating the big guys at the same game...You may have a local furniture shop within your local area that can offer you a much better quality to price ratio and bring your money right back into the local economy instead of sending it to a distant conglomerate.
Most of my furniture (everything not upholstered, dining table, dressers, cabinets, coffee table, etc) is all from a second hand store that buys estate furniture and refurbishes it. It's all solid wood, mostly from the '40s or earlier, and was way cheaper than even crappy IKEA stuff.
We bought a house at the end of 2020, and then went couch shopping. In stores as well as thrift shops.
> Buck at Rochester Institute of Technology says consumers could be better off spending a few thousand dollars to reupholster a thrift-store find or hand-me-down. “Most often the construction of vintage sofas will be superior to what’s made now,” Buck says.
This was my conclusion as well, but we still bought a cheap one. We just bought it from some guy who was selling his whole living room for a grand, so I don't mind too much if they fall apart in a few years. Build quality is not there for the wooden parts (I did my handyman thing there), but the leather at least is claimed to be top grain.
We bought a Joybird (or some other not-too-expensive online brand) and it's been fine in our living room (where it sees light-moderate usage). It's a 10 year sofa, at most, and that's without heavy use.
The family room, which gets a lot more use, was from a local furniture store. It was double the price and probably 3-4x as "good". I expect it will last for 20 years.
If you have one near you, I highly recommend The Original Mattress Factory. The big-name manufacturers all make 'individually wrapped coils' to make the mattresses 'conform to your body.' These coils are low gauge metal and wear out over time. The fact that they're individually wrapped means each coil is supporting weight on it's own rather than distributing the weight to coils that aren't directly under weight.
OMF still offers 'real coil spring' mattresses where the coils are thicker and connected with wire to help distribute the load. The mattresses are also able to be flipped vertically.
The best part is, the mattresses are typically hundreds or thousands cheaper than you'll pay for a 'name brand' mattress. What I like to do is buy a firm mattress and top with a separate pillow topper from amazon.
I have an inflatable mattress (basically like sleep number, but some other brand whose name I can't recall right now) and it's been fantastic for the last 4 years without any noticable wear and tear or degradation. We also have a 3 inch foam topper on top that has held up well, though that Will probably need replacement at some point.
That said, one of the biggest gamechangers I've noticed for sleep regardless of mattress type is actually the box spring. Box springs suck, the bed frames that use arched wooden slats for support instead of a box spring feel way more comfortable and supportive, even with the same mattress.
With mattresses it's really worth splurging if (1) you can afford it and (2) you actually like whatever you're splurging on. But it's hard to figure out the latter without physically trying the mattress ahead of time... I had to go be Goldilocks at a local mattress store for forty minutes before I found my match.
I don't see how 40 min could be enough. I find with the wrong mattress my back starts to get sore after days or weeks, and I've bought "100 night guarantee" mattresses that started to sag at about the 101st night. It's very hard, at least for me, to make any kind of quick assessment. I'd happily pay a lot but I have no idea what to buy and no confidence that what I do buy will actually last.
Agreed. We tried a name brand foam mattress and it was awful. Tried an Ikea foam that had good reviews and it was awful. Third times a charm - went back to "springs and stuff" and it's a much better mattress. It was $5000 or more (don't recall), but it's been good for 5 years so far with no signs of sagging or wearing out.
Worth noting, prior to my 40s, I really didn't care. Now that I'm deep into my 40s, every second of quality sleep counts and bad sleep means achey neck and back and stuff.
Latex is I guess fine. I have no complaints from sleeping on it. But it is a bear to move. If you don't have a couple of stevedores in your household, good luck.
I think we spent a couple of hours at the local mattress store. I certainly don't think being Goldilocks for 40 minutes is being as difficult a consumer as you seem to think the store might have perceived it as. If anything, local stores are probably happy to have customers who clearly appreciate being able to try before you buy, rather than just a one-click "oh, I can return it anyway" mattress buyer.
Thankfully our favorite mattress was the cheapest one in the store (~$700 for a cal king)
> “People have to choose between the right aesthetic, quality and price. If they want all three, good luck.”
Why though?
What am I supposed to do as a working professional who wants nice things as my parents had when they made far less than me? Practically?
It's just an overwhelming feeling that no matter how hard I work to keep up, even when I make it, the ground is pulled out from under me. Or I guess in this case, the couch.
When we outsourced blue collar jobs, we also eliminated middle class products. There are no more quality middle class goods because there are no more blue collar jobs.
We all also now have $1000 phones and all sorts of other electronic crap that we spend money on. I agree that "the middle" is gone and it's all low end garbage or luxury. But I'd like to see an analysis of where money goes now vs then. I think there's probably a lot more recurring payments (phone, streaming, etc) plus electronics compared to older generations.
Have you ever dreamt of your phone, something you hold onto and interact for goes at a time? You don't dream cell phones because (to your mind) they don't exist. They'rea boring box. Instead they are like the wardrobe to Narnia, a portal. Its what's through the glass that we're interested in.
With that perspective I finally understand why people spend $1000 to get a faster, bigger phone. Their reality's lag, and how much of it they can see is tied to that update.
It’s more that the shareholders needed to be appeased, and CEOs realized they could save money by firing people and could make money by making things cheaply. You can hire less-skilled workers if you don’t intend (or care) that your product breaks, which saves money especially if you laid off your highly-skilled workers.
There’s also no incentive to make a long-lasting product in a capitalist system, especially if your product does the thing it’s supposed to _really well_ and does it for a long time. Look at InstaPot - they sold like hot cakes…for a time. It worked great, did what it was supposed to, and lasted long enough that they couldn’t sustain their own successful business model.
A car can last a decade and still run well, it just won’t have the bells and whistles of a newer model. Cookware by and large, and couches, don’t really get this kind of “refresh” outside of surface level details or features people largely shy away from like “Alexa-enabled” ovens.
Out-sourcing comes into play because a company can pay even less for low-quality. I’m sure that if they could keep the jobs domestic and cheap, they would, but those pesky (/s) unions and minimum wages really stifled their innovation.
I think the implication is that you get a balance of the first two, within your budget.
Set a budget, look at your options. Realize that perfection is not possible and get the best option to fit your needs within your budget. If you do research and ask around, you might be able to maximize your value for what you pay.
Okay, but $3,000 for a couch sounds like a damn-reasonable budget, and apparently isn't? So can you tell me what my couch budget should be for a good couch that won't, in fact, break in three years?
$3000 in 1995 dollars is approximately $6,000 today, so should I start looking at $6,000 couches? Except the problem here is when my parents bought a nice couch in 1995, it certainly wasn't $3,000 (closer to $1,200), and it lasted 10 years.
$3000 is absolutely a perfectly fine budget, and you can get a well-made couch within that.
Some couches for that price will be cheaply made garbage. Some will be very well made. You have to look around, do research, look at customer feedback, see what reputation brands have, try a few, etc.
I got a motion sofa for $2k 5 years ago, it's still going well. For a regular sofa you'd be fine with less.
Just because poorly made and expensive furniture exists does not mean that all furniture is so.
it is kind of strange. $3000 seems like a lot of money for a low quality couch. So I am being told that both prices of furniture went up and quality went down over time. How does that happen exactly? The article doesn't go into it and instead just quotes some executive saying he stands behind the quality blah blah blah...
If I had to guess, I think the undue influence we give to MBAs leads to things like financialization of products. This means cost cutting and profit maximization. I think it's probably that combination that led to this. It wouldn't surprise me if the MBAs decided they could cut quality, outsource, and increase the price at the same time because it could be shown on a spreadsheet so obviously that dictates what should be done.
You sacrifice price, of course. "Fast, quality, cheap: pick two" has been an invariant in basically every industry since the beginning of... industry. And usually it's "pick one".
You are treating me as if I don't understand a fundamental aspect of engineering (rude) when I am pointing out that previously such optimizations were far less tradeoffs, as evidenced by the case of earlier couches which didn't have this problem.
Obviously you will always have to make tradeoffs, it's the core of life. Previously these tradeoffs were not so harsh, and the penalty for spending a bit less was not a couch that broke in a year.
I cant find anything of even half decent quality for a large sofa under 7k. Im not at all surprised i have been shopping around for months now with the hopes of finding something that will last in the 5k range but have yet to see it.
Not the cheapest, but in your range. They don't skimp on the quality and will tell you exactly which shop built it (most of their sofas are from various shops in North Carolina).
Cheap leather furniture looks nice initially, but the leather will be an unrepairable cracked or flaky mess in about five years. It's disposable on that timescale. But good leather furniture is so expensive that the yearly amortized cost of the cheap stuff may still be lower. You're probably better off avoiding leather entirely, unless money is no object.
I think if we compared similar quality products by adjusting for inflation, the picture may be less alarming. The real change is the modern appearance of much more inexpensive manufacturing (with all the consequences that entails).
To my understanding Rent to Own was around significantly earlier than the popular usage of credit cards:
"Development of the Rent-to-Own Concept: 1950s
The roots of the rent-to-own business reach back to the 1950s when a number of people pioneered the concept. For instance, Charles Loudermilk, Sr., founder of Atlanta-based Aaron Rents, started out in 1955 by renting Army surplus chairs for ten cents a day. The founder of Rent-A-Center was J. Ernest Talley, widely acknowledged as the most influential figure in the development of the industry.
In the 1950s he ran a retail appliance store with a cousin in Kansas. Because tightening bank credit prevented a number of customers from buying his merchandise, he hit on the idea of renting the items. If customers failed to meet the payments, he could always repossess the merchandise; if they reached the end of the rental agreement, they would own the merchandise and Talley would have made some extra cash in addition to increasing the sales volume of his appliance store.
In 1963 he developed a rent-to-own chain called Mr. T’s, which by 1974 had grown to 14 stores. He sold the business, which became part of the Remco chain, and he turned his attention to commercial real estate in the Dallas area.
When the Texas real estate market suffered a crash he returned to the rent-to-own concept in 1987, establishing Talley Leasing with his son Michael. The new company rented appliances to apartment complex owners."
While there's lot of valid complains about longevity of certain modern products, people often forget the other - more valid and rational - side of a story.
Modern life is different. Things are more dynamic, people have less time to take care of things, move more often. I specifically buy IKEA furnitures because I don't care about then and don't want to worry about them. When kids get older, or new one shows up and we need to re-arrange how we live to accommodate, I want to be able to throw away what no longer fits without worrying about how expensive it is. And when the kids wreck something, I just shrug and can afford a replacement. Passing some heirloom over generations is not on my mind.
Last year we bought a suite from DFS, a major UK furniture retailer. It's falling to bits. We'll put in warranty claims but we can already see how it'll fail in other ways.
We have another sofa from IKEA that's done 11 years service, going strong. IKEA gets a lot of crap for disposable furniture but they really understand their materials in a way that other manufacturers do not, or at least do don't care about.
DIY is something we're doing more of since a flat pack sideboard spontaneously disassembled itself a few years ago. It takes time but you can deliberately not cut corners and you still get cheaper furniture. And a hobby.
In UK if you want cheap and decent and sometimes even good quality go for Polish furniture. There's a Polish couch warehouse in Edgware where you can take a look if you fancy anything. We bought a Polish couch for £1.2k. It's amazing. It converts to a bed, it has nice head rests that are movable, etc. They come and assemble.
The $800 couches we’ve bought online (wayfair, etc.) is absolute shit that only lasts 2-3 years. The $1500 couch we got from a local, well established store is about 10 years old and perfectly fine. The other furniture we’ve gotten from them has also held up well.
Obliviously any store, online or otherwise, can have overpriced rubbish, and a good furniture store is probably more expensive and slower, but I’d rather go with an established shop where I can go in and throat chop the guy who sold me a particle board piece of shit than buy one more thing from IKEA or an online store.
Managed to snatch in a sofa before Canada imposed a up to 300% taffic on upholstered furniture from Vietnam and PRC. Suppose to help Canadian manufacturers, meanwhile Canadian sofas still suck. Got an popular IKEA model, thank god it had after market covers that can be replaced over time because IKEA discontinued it the same year and pulled all the replacable covers.
I'm surprised someone hasn't hacked the system yet. Like sell bed frame, padding, uphostery seperately.
Been using Ikea Kivik sofa for >12 years across 2 moves. We bought it with white cover. Recently we needed to get a bigger one, and realized we can just add 2 chaises on the sides. Bought them, and all new upholstery - now it's like a brand new bigger couch of different color. Happy side effect is that those chaises came with metal brackets that reinforced the whole thing. Here's to another 12 years. Ikea is underrated.
Serious question: enshittification seems to be plaguing all parts of our consumer economy at the moment. How can we actually address this? Are there economic or regulatory steps that we can make to ensure that we aren't forced into an eternal race to the bottom where product quality just trends to zero permanently?
Mature markets that reach enormous scale transform into a barbell shape, typically, with all the revenue being at the very top end, and the very bottom end.
Take furniture. In a new market you build a nice couch with decent materials that will last, and you charge a price that a middle-class income could afford. It will last, say, 15-20 years. You sell it, make money. Great.
Now a competitor comes along and makes a couch that will last 12-15 years. It's 20% cheaper, and your sales drop off a cliff. Your option is to lower your quality so you can lower your prices and compete, or go up market and _raise_ your prices, so you can stay in business.
Repeat this cycle many times, and you end up with nothing in the middle, because consumers will not buy (enough) things in the middle.
You can try to address this through quality regulation (ban certain materials, or require others, for example), which will raise the floor of the quality (in theory) while raising the floor price along with it. That will price people out of the market entirely, though.
You can place heavy import tariffs on products that are of lower quality coming from elsewhere in an attempt to create space for more locally produced mid-quality goods, but doing that prices out your poorer citizens from access to those goods entirely (and they won't like that, and will probably stop voting for you, eventually).
The problem is that human beings, on average, do _not_ value quality enough to keep a middle market alive.
Legally enforced minimum warranties.Prevent mergers and acquisitions. Break up big companies. Make purchase of cloud connected goods and services legally required to have an option to run independent should the vendor discontinue the cloud service, and that they have to refund or replace should an OTA update break a device despite warranty.
Counterpoint: This might be what increasing access to luxury goods looks like. A lower quality sells for a low(er) price point, which enables more people to buy what was once a luxury good. Perhaps this is what people give up for society to move to a more equitable place.
Forcing a level of quality would force a higher price point, which would price people out of access to the good. And no, "but the prices are still high" doesn't get you out of this jam. For as high as they are now, they would be even higher with quality guarantees.
So, if you want the "high quality" you're used to, that may mean spending more because you can afford to. And if you can't, then take solace in knowing that the product that's shitty to you is a new luxury to someone else.
That is a fair counterpoint. I think then the issue is potentially misleading marketing, where a good is being marketed as robust and high-quality when it is not in fact either of those things.
Is that “in fact”? I would argue that quality is relative, and when your comparison point is, “no access” you may consider access in any form to be of “superior” quality.
Overall I reject the negative attitude towards brands who have seemingly “gotten worse” over time in the same way I accept newcomers to the gym. Goods becoming more available (people using the gym) is a good thing, even if my personal experience gets marginally worse (access to equipment decreases).
Oh yeah. Marketing drives a lot of shit. Also I think the trend towards “marketplaces” makes things worse. Used to be if it was in a store, it meant there was a buyer whose job was to vet products the store sells. Cheap products would get returned, then pulled from shelves. Now if you buy online? store tanks. new store with same product with new random 6-8 character name. It’s one if the reasons I still like buying at costco, you can be pretty sure the product will be good for its price point.
It’s an artifact of the economic system that values profit above all else. Of course if short term profit is the goal then quality doesn’t matter, consumers don’t matter, employees don’t matter.
The way to fix it is to get rid of the system where idle shareholders extract every drop of value from companies while demanding ever more and move to one where companies have a goal of sustainably producing quality goods/services while treating employees well. Co-ops can be one model of this.
Also change the stock market to a simple way to get capital on a short term basis rather than an all consuming gambling machine. This means also having a way for folks to retire that doesn’t depend on them putting all their savings into a casino.
I swear I'm not being snarky here, but: isn't this supposed to be something the market can solve? Is there no eg furniture manufacturer looking at the state of things and resolving to make relatively affordable and durable furniture? I want durable shit. I want to buy stuff that's going to last. I know I'm not the only one. Is the only option for this to buy top dollar stuff? If you're buying crap every 2-10 years you may as well be renting, but with extra trash going into the landfill/on a boat to be burned and inhaled by children in a 3rd world dump.
I would also like to know what policy knobs to fiddle with that could change this situation, but I think the answer is probably something like "mumble mumble global finance capital".
Most people are not subject area experts in regards to infrequent purchases. From informal conversation it seems that a lot of consumers have experienced enshittification from brands and products that they previously held in high regard. This has resulted in them losing trust in the market and they now assume that anything they buy will be of poor quality regardless of other factors. As a result, they have given up on making purchasing decisions based on quality and now only purchase the cheapest product they can find.
This seems to have created a situation where consumers are unable to differentiate between different products based on quality and do not trust marketing because they've been lied to before.
If enough people care about quality, then there will be a market opportunity for a premium product. Eventually, once this market opportunity gets big enough, one or more companies will try to make a better product at a higher price with higher margins.
This might happen slowly, though you can count on the promise of high profit margins to make it happen sooner or later.
Of course, there are areas where we do have regulation, particularly when it comes to safety of products. This is a good option in many cases, though in many cases it would also be very difficult to define and enforce standards.
And there can be market problems such as oligopolies or monopolies that prevent robust competition from happening. In those cases, it can be up to antitrust regulators to correct the market.
Keep items for more than 5 minutes. if you actually believe that you will use the sofa for 20 years because you won't move. Then it's worth the investment. most people don't.
people are poorer than they realize and are choosing to push their dollars towards more instant gratification. new phones, costco, lifesystle, doordash, living close to entertainment and cities.
This is the myth of the middle class. earn good or great money but spend it all.
people worrying about what other people think. buying car, house, clothes
I don’t know that we can. One aspect of enshitification I don’t see talked about is how the middle of markets are disappearing. Economic forces seem to push goods to both ends of the spectrum, either super cheap or super expensive, with no ability to navigate middle quality for very long. Most people seem to shop with price as their first concern, those who don’t are willing to pay more for certain qualities/features. But since everyone may be shopping for different features, now volume is low and price necessarily needs to be high. I suspect this is unavoidable.
Get rid of stock markets. Make raising money by issuing stocks illegal.
Seriously, this type of short term thinking is a direct result of focusing on quarterly profits reports. Making shitty product that falls apart after a year boosts your sales next year
People should pay what the actual cost of a thing is. This will never happen because everyone who isn't a rich Tech person would revolt. Thus we tend toward cheapness.
It's a great question. Unfortunately I think this is a factor of the free-market economy. Products are getting shittier because ultimately consumers accept them. And when better (and more expensive products) are produced, not enough people are actually willing to pay for higher quality even though we all complain about enshittification.
Airfares are a perfect example. Airlines started offering garbage "Basic Economy" and still offered regular economy for a slightly higher price. What happened? Everyone still chose the cheapest no matter what, so Basic Economy rules the day.
> Products are getting shittier because ultimately consumers accept them.
More like consumers are unable to find anything that isn't shitty. The entire article is about people who spent good money on a product, bought from brands with good reputations, and their products still turned out to be trash. This is not a case of people being unwilling to pay for anything but cheapest options and getting shit-tier goods, it's about how an increasing number of companies are demanding high prices but giving nothing but cheap trash dressed up to look like quality in return.
It turns out that it's a lot more profitable to sell people highly priced garbage than to give them quality goods. Every furniture company wants to make more profit, so now they all sell highly priced garbage and there is no one left making quality goods at a reasonable price to take customers away from the people who cheating us.
I think we should consider adding meaningful taxes to materials that are cheap and disproportionately contributing to short-lived products that end up in landfills or waste streams. The article names particle board and MDF. Are there any applications in which those _don't_ have a much shorter lifespan and are used as lower-cost alternatives for plywood? Similarly, a bunch of plastics, laminates for surfaces subject to meaningful wear. All these are known cheap, low-quality, garbage waiting to happen, and as a society, we should be actively discouraging them. If we artificially make MDF that lasts a few years cost the same as plywood that might last decades, producers would have less motivation to pick the cheaper enshittified option.
As someone who has built a few hobby speaker cabinets, you absolutely CAN make durable and high quality objects for the home out of MDF. Or even particle board. So I think using taxes to try to discourage the use of certain materials in favor of others is misguided and only likely to lead to manufacturers doing different but worse underhanded cost cutting.
The problem is not the material per se but using inappropriate fastening methods for the type of material and/or a design that stresses the material in a modality where it is weak rather than where it is strong. An example of an inappropriate fastening method would be a screw into the edge of a laminated panel and the joint not glued.
For an example on the done-right side, if you look at any knockdown speaker cabinet kit from e.g. Parts Express, the MDF parts will have bracing and grooves where the user is meant to use wood glue, and screws mainly just to hold it together until the glue sets.
In furniture an example of using MDF in a way that almost has to be intentionally bad design: I have a tall chest of bedroom drawers where the drawer slides are suspended 2.5" off the internal walls by horizontal rectangular blocks of MDF. The blocks are oriented in a way that gravity and the torque on the block causes the layers of the MDF to de-laminate. (Picture riffle shuffling a deck of cards.) The resulting sag in turn makes the drawer slides no longer align.
Almost anything else could have been done to make this design better. They could have rotated the grain direction of the MDF blocks 90 degrees. They could have oriented the blocks vertically in the long direction. They could have used 2x3 lumber (vertical or horizontal) instead of MDF. They could have actually made the sides as thick as the facade pretends they are. (The sides are hollow.) They could have brought the sides in to where the drawer slides actually are. Etc. etc.
Some of those things would have cost more or made the (lying) appearance of the furniture less substantial looking. But some of these solutions use the same (MDF) material and same or similar amounts, just different orientation. Either the person who designed it was an absolute dumbass, or it was deliberately made in a way that would fail after more than 90 days but less than 2 years.
Mandating different materials doesn't protect against stupidity or malice.
Ok, I asked for cases where MDF isn't just a cheap shitty replacement and you gave me one.
But the efficacy of such a tax is based on the proportion of MDF that goes to crap, short-lifespan products. I don't have numbers here, but if there's a whole lot more crap furniture than hobby speaker cabinets, I would still be favor of policies discouraging the use of these materials.
I get that buying used products might be a partial solution at a personal level, but that doesn't change the fact that we're producing ever more cheap, low-quality stuff. What the market is ideally supposed to do is optimise for the tuple (cheap, quality). It doesn't seem to be doing that, as it seems like things are being optimised for (cheap, perceived quality), and just straight up lying about their quality. When people are buying stuff online, it is even easier to just focus on the price. How do we fix this?
The first time I heard the old-money put-down about someone who had "bought their own furniture" my American newer-is-better head spun (and I'm not much of a "consumer" by American standards).
Not only are we socially conditioned to prefer new, as you point out, this is further reinforced by the necessity imposed by disposable-quality products.
I think the parent commenter's answer was pretty valid. You have to vote with your wallet. Buying used will signal to the market that people don't want the crap that's being produced. Or, especially, given the generous return policies these days, buy new and then don't hesitate to return something if you don't like it.
That's a temporary and limited response. I've heard from people that sell vintage clothes that this will basically die as an industry because the more recent garments just don't have the lifespan.
Wouldn't be surprised. Good furniture can be had second-hand now, but if everyone starts doing this demand will outstrip supply by far.
My first sofa was a turquoise leather 2½ seater bought for €100 from a municipal charity shop. Impossible to resell it turned out, but still in excellent condition we had the municipal charity shop in our new town pick it up (they sold it pretty fast; this is one of those sofas you have to see in a store to say “hey, this could work for me”).
Our present sofa is an ox-blood 2 seater Chesterfield-type one bought for €400 from a piercing shop which had it for waiting customers for only a brief while. Excellent condition and likely to last us another decade at least (if I didn't have a child I would be more sure about it lasting my lifetime).
We’re doomed. How can i find any faith in humanity when a genocide is happening before our eyes. Not to mention the orientation of all efforts towards profit over all other ends; how could we be so stupid and short sighted? It’s not even individuals who choose such oppression, rather we are monetarily oppressed. I am about to graduate college and going to school, while fun, has showed me the terrible realities, that the world is cold, that ideas, knowledge, genuine connection, or anything else is worthless before profit. That i have significantly less faith in the world now than i did before college because i look at my peers, the world, and think we have no chance at changing this shit. I am directing the entirety of my existence to ending capitalist pursuit of money and the bucket of ways it oppresses people; every day it brings me closer to killing myself. Yet its not us people who can change anything, its the blind dinosaurs who are stuck in a dream world, living in the past, who rule us and dont realize how many lives are caught up in their dramatic dance.
I bought a large corner sofa in the US in 2013 for 4k from a store in Santa Rosa. Still using it, have moved it to Europe and then New Zealand and it has put up with 3 kids and a multitude of cats. At some point we'll get it re-upholstered. It seems better made than anything I could afford or even find now.
No one can afford to buy a home they plan to grow old in and those that do make their way into the professional, upper middle class find themselves drifting from $MAJOR_US_CITY_A to $MAJOR_US_CITY_B every 5 years or so.
How could someone possibly expect this not to happen to furniture?
I bought a house outside DC. Unless I retire to the mountains, I'll grow old here. It's my second home, the other was a few miles away, I've been in this area since 2000. Pretty sure my middle-management position fits my squarely in "professional, upper-middle-class."
Most of my friends are similar. Moved here after college, no plans to leave the area, almost all are home owners, and upper-middle-class.
Is what I should say to you. I should not have to inquire the specifics of your personal life to figure out your true income, who has maybe subsidized your living expenses over the years, and your total expenses, to determine how you were able to save for property in one of the most expensive areas of the nation. Although, you have already earmarked your comment with "upper-middle-class", which speaks to your ancedote-rooted perspective.
How does the peanut gallery feel about Sleep Number beds? What about Purple and others of its ilk? I have never tried any of these, but I am evaluating new mattresses and don't want to spend money on something massively overpriced.
Things like a bed and pillow are so specific to a person that, IMO, reading reviews from other people is largely an aimless pursuit. It's a bit like asking, _will that shirt look good on me?_ and taking someone's answer of _it looks good on me_ as a confirmation.
About the Purple mattress I will say: it is very heavy and difficult to move. And that grid stuff will last roughly forever. The only other non-personalized advice I would give about it is to feel an actual mattress, not a sample and not a pillow. The effect of the grid feels different when it's mattress-sized and with all the other layers, so the effect might not be what you're expecting if your only experience is a pillow or sample.
We've been pretty satisfied with Room and Board furniture, which is typically made in the US. While a bit more expensive it's not really that different from the $3K garbage price point and seems to last (so far).
This is why I paid $40 on FB marketplace for a $500 Ikea couch that you can replace the entire cover on. Bonus, I didn't even have to replace the cover. =)
so much furniture is absolute junk. plastic veneers on cheap plywood. The cost of hardwood is just too expensive plus labor and shipping and sales overhead.
as far as I can tell in the US, you need to get to crate and barrel price points for it to last and be comfortable.
why do couch cushions sag so much? Is there a certain type of cushion that holds up better or something we can do? So many couches just look horrible because the cushions have lost all their shape after a year.
I share this list of furniture makers anytime a post about modern furniture comes up. I usually get dinged for posting luxury goods, and am told I must be detached from reality. I like nice things. Here it is anyway:
If you want a sofa that will last a lifetime, buy one from Knoll and you can get it reupholstered 20 years from now:
https://nakashimawoodworkers.com (new commissions around $7K-$15K for a coffee table, $20K-40K for dining table, plus shipping; older Nakashima pieces are highly valued in the art world and sell anywhere between $15K-$300K)
And as a reminder: your local woodworker can build all sorts of furniture, with and without upholstery. You can also find all sorts of antique and vintage pieces online (modern, unfinished, or restored) and at local second-hand furniture stores.
If you're getting upholstered pieces (or need to custom order fabric) opt for natural materials, particularly linen and wool. Or quality leather! They'll last much longer synthetic blends:
100 years ago is harder for me to comment on, but in truth, furniture quality has continually declined. We moved from solid wood to veneered wood dust because it’s easier to manufacture - abstracted trees are perfectly homogeneous vs the real ones. That comes at the cost of being un-repairable. A scratch in solid wood is character (according to Nakashima) while a scratch through veneer breaks the illusion. A water stained veneer (as from a coffee cup) wrecks the entire piece by swelling and popping up the veneer. Even if a piece can be repaired, it’s typically more cost effective to replace.
More or less all non-designer (herman miller/knoll) non-craft furniture has been outsourced to IKEA and China which both trade price for quality. The entire American industry was killed, and with it, we lost high quality mid-range furniture.
Another way to look at this is that the sq ft per person has increased 50% in the US over the last 50 years. We choose to live in large, shit quality houses and in turn, fill them with loads of shit quality furniture.
Furniture manufacturers 50-100 years ago didn't have the option to cheap out in as many ways as they do now. My grandpa was an electrician repairing dishwashers, dryers, and washing machines for most of his career. He started sometime after he left the army, so this was late 40's or early 50's since he was lucky and missed the Korean War, finally fully retired in the early 2000's. The internals on Maytag dishwashers were all metal back then, because plastic wasn't really an option. OEM replacement parts were also way cheaper and easier to obtain back then before a lot of companies realized they could make bank overcharging for parts. There's a massive difference in manufacturing quality and other features for modern furniture and appliances.
I've been shopping for furniture lately and can confirm, it all feels like cheap junk unless it's VERY expensive.
I wish I could find a mattress that lasts even more than a couch. I only sit on the couch a few times a week, so it doesn't matter as much as my bed!