5 ms·

There's a disconnect when I look at the price of good furniture compared to products that are insanely more complicated (laptops, smartphones), heavier than fur

There's a disconnect when I look at the price of good furniture compared to products that are insanely more complicated (laptops, smartphones), heavier than furniture (motorbikes, snowblowers, lawnmowers), as bulky as flatpack bookcases (big screen TVs), and need to be shipped even greater distances than furniture (all my examples would be coming to the U.S. from Asia). Furthermore, furniture has much less regulation than electronics and motorized things (so it should be cheaper), furniture needs much less capital (a new TV manufacturing facility would cost hundreds of millions of dollars), and designing a new piece of furniture needs a tiny fraction of the engineers and programmers that any new laptop, TV, or smartphone would require. I think that good furniture in general is still grossly expensive and I don't understand where the money is going. EDIT: I have an example: I have a Sharp 60-inch TV, bought in 2011 for $1319.99, and weighs 92.6 pounds or 42 kg according to the spec sheet. I also have a dining room table bought the same year for ~$1200 and which weighs less than the TV. Considering that the TV is literally a million times more complicated than the table and that the raw materials of the TV (sand->silicon->ICs, petroleum->plastics) have undergone vastly greater transformation than a table (wood, glue, iron->nails), why isn't the TV much more expensive or the table much cheaper? Both are commodities and both are made on assembly lines.

DannyBee 10y ago
Pretty much all the answers below you are wrong :) The real reason is simply that nobody wants it. The machinery/etc exists to make it completely trivial to productionize semi-custom and completely custom furniture, out of high quality wood. From 5-axis CNC to multi-angle boring machines to what have you. Heck, with the copy of alphacam i have, i could program pretty much most of a factory. (and it doesn't need to acclimate, it's kiln dried. You just keep your factory at the same humidity as the climate it's going to. Even then, most of the issues you hit are around finishing and solvable). Your biggest underlying problem, again, contrary to the comments, is actually that real high quality lumber is not a sheet good. For for tops/etc, you have to spend the machining time to make it one (IE automatically plane/cut/join, then machine). Doable, but it entails some cost.
- computator 10y ago
  > The real reason is simply that nobody wants it. Could you expand on that? Obviously people do want Ikea, so why wouldn't people want mass-produced really-good furniture?
  - DannyBee 10y ago
    Sure. Let's look at some of the major pieces of furniture people have: Tables, cabinets, chairs. It's the same story with all of them. Let's start with cabinets. A bit of cheating since most people don't consider it furniture, but worth talking about. Most people want white or colored cabinets. The "natural wood" look is mostly out of style these days, due to mass over-production of red-oak cabinets (and thank god. they made them because red oak was the cheapest most available hardwood in the us for many many years) Where it isn't, they want something that "looks" like cherry (or what they think cherry looks like), or mahogany but isn't. People are more than happy to buy cabinets with thin veneers or laminated whatever on them. They have no concept of construction quality, etc. They don't care. People who do care are willing to pay, but even then, don't know what they are paying for. Given that, what precisely supports the price differential of making "really good" for people who don't care and aren't willing to pay for it? The answer is "nothing" :) Thus, it's not cost effective to make cabinets out cherry, when coloring poplar reddish will do. It's also usually not cost effective to use real wood for anything that is going to be topcoated a solid color. But again, you have this issue that there is a high-end, and a low-end, and the middle end doesn't exist, really, it's just low-end stuff sold at a higher price. Because they can. It's pretty much all mass produced, BTW. Note: The last part to be automated is finishing, and as the cost of flat-line finishing machines comes down from 100k to 10k, the number of shops buying them goes up, as happened with regular CNC. But even in finishes, people can't tell what they are paying for. In an ideal world, you want your cabinets done with a nice 2k post-catalyzed conversion varnish (US) or 2k urethane (europe). Or uv-cured stuff that is equivalent. They will be very highly scratch resistant, highly moisture and chemical resistant, etc. Can a consumer tell? No. They will look identical at the start. Unless you rubbed acetone on them, you are unlikely to be able to tell if the finish is a post-cat or not from the finished product. You would have to place 3-4 years wear and tear on them, and see how scratched and stained they look. So instead, a ton of non-factory cabinet makers still use pretty crappy finishes (pre-cat lacquers, etc) because they are cheap and fast. 2k stuff requires accurate mixing and has a pot-life. Good folks these days use cyclomix or equivalent, or uv cure, or something, to make up for this. But the main sales point is lack of callbacks, which is hard to quantify. This kind of quality is hard to sell. Nobody (well, not enough people) really look at their cabinets n years later and says "hey, i bet that guy didn't do a great finishing job", instead they say "gee, i guess i'm hard on cabinets". Interestingly, plenty of commercial work will call you on this kind of thing happening. But consumers just suck it up. That's cabinets. Let's say that's a special case for a second. Tables. Well, okay, so to start, people do buy mass produced really-good stuff already. IIRC, most of the furniture restoration hardware sells is mass-produced. I've also seen really well-made mass-produced stuff at crate and barrel before (in fact, in one case, better than i could make it by far, and i've been woodworking for 20+ years) But most people are not willing to pay for this stuff, and those who do, are willing to buy cheaply made stuff for higher prices. Let's take http://www.crateandbarrel.com/dakota-77-dining-table/s517252 http://www.crateandbarrel.com/dakota-77-dining-table/s517252 Top is solid wood, pretty simple and machined construction. You could produce it really cheaply with machines (and i'm sure they do) But people are willing to pay 1499, and if i make the same thing, with a veneer top and same glued-on live edge (IE not "really-good"), and sell it for half price, people will buy it. So why would i make it "really good" for 799 when i can make it "really crappy" for 799 and people buy it? and that's precisely what happens! Chairs are the same. In general, people care what things look like, not how they are made or what they are made of. So most people aren't willing to pay for quality, even if you tried to educate them about what it looked like (if you have to educate your market that you are better, you are probably going to lose) This makes it not cost-effective to try to optimize for quality. Somebody will just out-sell you and out-profit you by making it crappily and selling it for 80% of the same price. This is in fact, the history of the world here. The good stuff either got pushed to the high end, or out-sold/out-stripped by people making crappy stuff and selling it at the middle end, and then making super-crappy stuff and selling it at the low-end. In any of these markets, there isn't room in the market for this linear-curve of quality vs pricing. If quality vs price was a 10 point scale, it'd look like this right now: quality: 1-3 price: 1-6 quality: 4-9 price: 7-8 quality: 10 price: 9-10 As a result, quality 4-9 doesn't get done much, and it makes no sense to make quality 10 furniture and sell it at price 2.
jimmies 10y ago
Wait until you see art... There is no regulation, it comes with probably no return policy. It requires one person to do -- art doesn't need capital to start at all. Yet art is insanely expensive. Do you rather be a programmer, an engineer, a fashion designer, a woodworker, or an artist? I don't have a good answer for your question, but I think the idea here is everyone needs a living. Also, you don't need to purchase a new bookcase every year like you do with, say, your smartphone.
- computator 10y ago
  > Yet art is insanely expensive. That's not true. There are a billion people putting their art on the Internet every day: DeviantArt, Pinterest, Flickr, Shutterfly, and other sites with fan fiction, manuscripts of books, cartoons, millions of homemade videos, music sites. The average price of all of this art is zero. Only a very tiny fraction of people make money with art.
  - estomagordo 10y ago
    > The average price of all of this art is zero. And the average quality is less than zero.
    - jacobush 10y ago
      I don't think so... I think we are being spoiled by the vast amounts of. I am one of the generations who had formative experiences before internet, and I would have been completely transfixed by the stuff on say, deviantart. I could look at weird stuff in the library for hours sometimes, and half of that was not very good at all.
  - lawless123 10y ago
    >DeviantArt Did anyone else shudder?
    - amiga-workbench 10y ago
      What? Is Sonic the Hedgehog inflation fetish porn not your thing?
jahnu 10y ago
It's just scale. Only a really really good designer can make furniture good enough to look and function better than mass produced. It takes time and their production runs are typically limited to at most double digits a year. These people will not work for a pittance and being intelligent and motivated would move on to other work if they can't earn well. All this conspires to make a market where few people are good enough, can earn enough and find the few clients that can afford it. I love my billy shelves. I also have a dining table that cost 4 figures that I'll have for life and is unlikely to be seen in another house so it lends my home a personal touch. Which humans like :)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
Freak_NL 10y ago
It's the economy of scale; complexity is mostly a one time upfront cost. Once you've figured out how to efficiently make a hundred TVs at a time, you know how to make a million. For a TV most of the materials and components are either plastic (and thus light and cheap) or generic silica based stuff that is produced in batches of millions at a time (electronic components) in the blink of an eye. The most expensive parts of a TV are probably its screen (complexity) and the copper wiring (cost of material). With a wood table the production of all parts takes much more labour, and high quality wood furniture is usually made of parts that have exact measurements and specifications for that particular model of table. Wood is also a live material; no two pieces are alike (this holds true from the unprocessed logs to the finished table legs). Lumber also needs time to acclimatize, so the whole resources to product cycle takes a lot longer (increasing storage costs). Also, unless you are Ikea, a globally operating corporation can sell a lot more TVs than dining tables.
- computator 10y ago
  Lots of global companies make TVs (LG, Samsung, Philips, Toshiba, Panasonic, Sharp, Sony, ...) but it seems that "there are no real Ikea competitors in the world, period."[1] So why aren't there more globally operating corporations selling furniture? Could there be an opportunity for a higher-end (better than Ikea) highly-automated global furniture maker to take away market from thousands of small local furniture makers all over the world? [1] https://www.quora.com/Who-are-Ikeas-competitors https://www.quora.com/Who-are-Ikeas-competitors
  - Freak_NL 10y ago
    Perhaps a combination of much more variation in both models and regional tastes. TVs get replaced a lot faster than good quality dining tables too. Come to think of it, there really isn't that much of a variety in choice of TVs (a few sizes, perhaps a curved screen or not) compared to dining tables — the latter are much more personal in taste.
- DannyBee 10y ago
  "With a wood table the production of all parts takes much more labour" No, they don't. Really. This is a pretty trivial application of CNC. I CNC table legs on my simple one, and have designed much larger CNC automations for local shops that CNC them. The people who are doing it at factory scale would find this utterly trivial. " and high quality wood furniture is usually made of parts that have exact measurements and specifications for that particular model of table." This doesn't mean anything to the robots. Really. They just don't care. They are already automatically referencing and aligning things to get them square. They use lasers or other sensors plus vacuum to automatically align it to alignment pins within 0.001". Just not a big deal. "Wood is also a live material; no two pieces are alike (this holds true from the unprocessed logs to the finished table legs)." Again, sorry. I pay my supplier for 90% red cherry. I could pay him for 100% red cherry. If you think i can't make a computer grain match stuff, etc, i don't know what to tell you. more automated cnc cabinet shops do it all day long. " Lumber also needs time to acclimatize, so the whole resources to product cycle takes a lot longer (increasing storage costs)." No, it doesn't, it's kiln dried, and the only thing that matters is the climate it's going to. For what is being done to it (making a table), it doesn't matter since the top will be floating anyway. "Also, unless you are Ikea, a globally operating corporation can sell a lot more TVs than dining tables. " This is literally the only reason: People don't want it compared to the ikea furniture. They don't care, and aren't or can't pay a premium.
kobeya 10y ago
Actually I'm pretty sure the molecular machines that make up your wooden dining set are billions of times more complicated than your TV...
pjc50 10y ago
Wood is remarkably expensive. Especially cabinet-grade wood that's free from knots. Even more so if you want sustainable hardwood. I've costed up doing my own furniture and it's far more expensive than IKEA even if you count your own labour as free. Furniture assembly is surprisingly non-automated.
mcv 10y ago
You chose to pay that much for the table. There are cheaper tables. You can get one for less than $100 if you want. But those probably don't meet your standards, and this one does. Similarly, there are TVs that are much more expensive, but you decided to go for this one.
vidanay 10y ago
Your TV could conceivably stay in functioning order for 20 years. More likely 5 years. Your table could conceivably stay in functioning order for 2000 years. More likely 500 years. Quality built wood furniture has essentially an indefinite lifespan.
- wavefunction 10y ago
  That's assuming maintenance and care for the table, which is not much of a possibility with the TV. Another + for real wood furniture!

DannyBee 10y ago

Pretty much all the answers below you are wrong :) The real reason is simply that nobody wants it. The machinery/etc exists to make it completely trivial to productionize semi-custom and completely custom furniture, out of high quality wood. From 5-axis CNC to multi-angle boring machines to what have you. Heck, with the copy of alphacam i have, i could program pretty much most of a factory. (and it doesn't need to acclimate, it's kiln dried. You just keep your factory at the same humidity as the climate it's going to. Even then, most of the issues you hit are around finishing and solvable). Your biggest underlying problem, again, contrary to the comments, is actually that real high quality lumber is not a sheet good. For for tops/etc, you have to spend the machining time to make it one (IE automatically plane/cut/join, then machine). Doable, but it entails some cost.

computator 10y ago
> The real reason is simply that nobody wants it. Could you expand on that? Obviously people do want Ikea, so why wouldn't people want mass-produced really-good furniture?
- DannyBee 10y ago
  Sure. Let's look at some of the major pieces of furniture people have: Tables, cabinets, chairs. It's the same story with all of them. Let's start with cabinets. A bit of cheating since most people don't consider it furniture, but worth talking about. Most people want white or colored cabinets. The "natural wood" look is mostly out of style these days, due to mass over-production of red-oak cabinets (and thank god. they made them because red oak was the cheapest most available hardwood in the us for many many years) Where it isn't, they want something that "looks" like cherry (or what they think cherry looks like), or mahogany but isn't. People are more than happy to buy cabinets with thin veneers or laminated whatever on them. They have no concept of construction quality, etc. They don't care. People who do care are willing to pay, but even then, don't know what they are paying for. Given that, what precisely supports the price differential of making "really good" for people who don't care and aren't willing to pay for it? The answer is "nothing" :) Thus, it's not cost effective to make cabinets out cherry, when coloring poplar reddish will do. It's also usually not cost effective to use real wood for anything that is going to be topcoated a solid color. But again, you have this issue that there is a high-end, and a low-end, and the middle end doesn't exist, really, it's just low-end stuff sold at a higher price. Because they can. It's pretty much all mass produced, BTW. Note: The last part to be automated is finishing, and as the cost of flat-line finishing machines comes down from 100k to 10k, the number of shops buying them goes up, as happened with regular CNC. But even in finishes, people can't tell what they are paying for. In an ideal world, you want your cabinets done with a nice 2k post-catalyzed conversion varnish (US) or 2k urethane (europe). Or uv-cured stuff that is equivalent. They will be very highly scratch resistant, highly moisture and chemical resistant, etc. Can a consumer tell? No. They will look identical at the start. Unless you rubbed acetone on them, you are unlikely to be able to tell if the finish is a post-cat or not from the finished product. You would have to place 3-4 years wear and tear on them, and see how scratched and stained they look. So instead, a ton of non-factory cabinet makers still use pretty crappy finishes (pre-cat lacquers, etc) because they are cheap and fast. 2k stuff requires accurate mixing and has a pot-life. Good folks these days use cyclomix or equivalent, or uv cure, or something, to make up for this. But the main sales point is lack of callbacks, which is hard to quantify. This kind of quality is hard to sell. Nobody (well, not enough people) really look at their cabinets n years later and says "hey, i bet that guy didn't do a great finishing job", instead they say "gee, i guess i'm hard on cabinets". Interestingly, plenty of commercial work will call you on this kind of thing happening. But consumers just suck it up. That's cabinets. Let's say that's a special case for a second. Tables. Well, okay, so to start, people do buy mass produced really-good stuff already. IIRC, most of the furniture restoration hardware sells is mass-produced. I've also seen really well-made mass-produced stuff at crate and barrel before (in fact, in one case, better than i could make it by far, and i've been woodworking for 20+ years) But most people are not willing to pay for this stuff, and those who do, are willing to buy cheaply made stuff for higher prices. Let's take http://www.crateandbarrel.com/dakota-77-dining-table/s517252 http://www.crateandbarrel.com/dakota-77-dining-table/s517252 Top is solid wood, pretty simple and machined construction. You could produce it really cheaply with machines (and i'm sure they do) But people are willing to pay 1499, and if i make the same thing, with a veneer top and same glued-on live edge (IE not "really-good"), and sell it for half price, people will buy it. So why would i make it "really good" for 799 when i can make it "really crappy" for 799 and people buy it? and that's precisely what happens! Chairs are the same. In general, people care what things look like, not how they are made or what they are made of. So most people aren't willing to pay for quality, even if you tried to educate them about what it looked like (if you have to educate your market that you are better, you are probably going to lose) This makes it not cost-effective to try to optimize for quality. Somebody will just out-sell you and out-profit you by making it crappily and selling it for 80% of the same price. This is in fact, the history of the world here. The good stuff either got pushed to the high end, or out-sold/out-stripped by people making crappy stuff and selling it at the middle end, and then making super-crappy stuff and selling it at the low-end. In any of these markets, there isn't room in the market for this linear-curve of quality vs pricing. If quality vs price was a 10 point scale, it'd look like this right now: quality: 1-3 price: 1-6 quality: 4-9 price: 7-8 quality: 10 price: 9-10 As a result, quality 4-9 doesn't get done much, and it makes no sense to make quality 10 furniture and sell it at price 2.

jimmies 10y ago

Wait until you see art... There is no regulation, it comes with probably no return policy. It requires one person to do -- art doesn't need capital to start at all. Yet art is insanely expensive. Do you rather be a programmer, an engineer, a fashion designer, a woodworker, or an artist? I don't have a good answer for your question, but I think the idea here is everyone needs a living. Also, you don't need to purchase a new bookcase every year like you do with, say, your smartphone.

computator 10y ago
> Yet art is insanely expensive. That's not true. There are a billion people putting their art on the Internet every day: DeviantArt, Pinterest, Flickr, Shutterfly, and other sites with fan fiction, manuscripts of books, cartoons, millions of homemade videos, music sites. The average price of all of this art is zero. Only a very tiny fraction of people make money with art.
- estomagordo 10y ago
  > The average price of all of this art is zero. And the average quality is less than zero.
  - jacobush 10y ago
    I don't think so... I think we are being spoiled by the vast amounts of. I am one of the generations who had formative experiences before internet, and I would have been completely transfixed by the stuff on say, deviantart. I could look at weird stuff in the library for hours sometimes, and half of that was not very good at all.
- lawless123 10y ago
  >DeviantArt Did anyone else shudder?
  - amiga-workbench 10y ago
    What? Is Sonic the Hedgehog inflation fetish porn not your thing?

jahnu 10y ago

It's just scale. Only a really really good designer can make furniture good enough to look and function better than mass produced. It takes time and their production runs are typically limited to at most double digits a year. These people will not work for a pittance and being intelligent and motivated would move on to other work if they can't earn well. All this conspires to make a market where few people are good enough, can earn enough and find the few clients that can afford it. I love my billy shelves. I also have a dining table that cost 4 figures that I'll have for life and is unlikely to be seen in another house so it lends my home a personal touch. Which humans like :)

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

Freak_NL 10y ago

It's the economy of scale; complexity is mostly a one time upfront cost. Once you've figured out how to efficiently make a hundred TVs at a time, you know how to make a million. For a TV most of the materials and components are either plastic (and thus light and cheap) or generic silica based stuff that is produced in batches of millions at a time (electronic components) in the blink of an eye. The most expensive parts of a TV are probably its screen (complexity) and the copper wiring (cost of material). With a wood table the production of all parts takes much more labour, and high quality wood furniture is usually made of parts that have exact measurements and specifications for that particular model of table. Wood is also a live material; no two pieces are alike (this holds true from the unprocessed logs to the finished table legs). Lumber also needs time to acclimatize, so the whole resources to product cycle takes a lot longer (increasing storage costs). Also, unless you are Ikea, a globally operating corporation can sell a lot more TVs than dining tables.

computator 10y ago
Lots of global companies make TVs (LG, Samsung, Philips, Toshiba, Panasonic, Sharp, Sony, ...) but it seems that "there are no real Ikea competitors in the world, period."[1] So why aren't there more globally operating corporations selling furniture? Could there be an opportunity for a higher-end (better than Ikea) highly-automated global furniture maker to take away market from thousands of small local furniture makers all over the world? [1] https://www.quora.com/Who-are-Ikeas-competitors https://www.quora.com/Who-are-Ikeas-competitors
- Freak_NL 10y ago
  Perhaps a combination of much more variation in both models and regional tastes. TVs get replaced a lot faster than good quality dining tables too. Come to think of it, there really isn't that much of a variety in choice of TVs (a few sizes, perhaps a curved screen or not) compared to dining tables — the latter are much more personal in taste.
DannyBee 10y ago
"With a wood table the production of all parts takes much more labour" No, they don't. Really. This is a pretty trivial application of CNC. I CNC table legs on my simple one, and have designed much larger CNC automations for local shops that CNC them. The people who are doing it at factory scale would find this utterly trivial. " and high quality wood furniture is usually made of parts that have exact measurements and specifications for that particular model of table." This doesn't mean anything to the robots. Really. They just don't care. They are already automatically referencing and aligning things to get them square. They use lasers or other sensors plus vacuum to automatically align it to alignment pins within 0.001". Just not a big deal. "Wood is also a live material; no two pieces are alike (this holds true from the unprocessed logs to the finished table legs)." Again, sorry. I pay my supplier for 90% red cherry. I could pay him for 100% red cherry. If you think i can't make a computer grain match stuff, etc, i don't know what to tell you. more automated cnc cabinet shops do it all day long. " Lumber also needs time to acclimatize, so the whole resources to product cycle takes a lot longer (increasing storage costs)." No, it doesn't, it's kiln dried, and the only thing that matters is the climate it's going to. For what is being done to it (making a table), it doesn't matter since the top will be floating anyway. "Also, unless you are Ikea, a globally operating corporation can sell a lot more TVs than dining tables. " This is literally the only reason: People don't want it compared to the ikea furniture. They don't care, and aren't or can't pay a premium.

kobeya 10y ago

Actually I'm pretty sure the molecular machines that make up your wooden dining set are billions of times more complicated than your TV...

pjc50 10y ago

Wood is remarkably expensive. Especially cabinet-grade wood that's free from knots. Even more so if you want sustainable hardwood. I've costed up doing my own furniture and it's far more expensive than IKEA even if you count your own labour as free. Furniture assembly is surprisingly non-automated.

mcv 10y ago

You chose to pay that much for the table. There are cheaper tables. You can get one for less than $100 if you want. But those probably don't meet your standards, and this one does. Similarly, there are TVs that are much more expensive, but you decided to go for this one.

vidanay 10y ago

Your TV could conceivably stay in functioning order for 20 years. More likely 5 years. Your table could conceivably stay in functioning order for 2000 years. More likely 500 years. Quality built wood furniture has essentially an indefinite lifespan.

wavefunction 10y ago
That's assuming maintenance and care for the table, which is not much of a possibility with the TV. Another + for real wood furniture!