> You don't find many small proprietors selling furniture and appliances in the U.S.; it works in cities like Quito because of the physical model of an open-air

> You don't find many small proprietors selling furniture and appliances in the U.S.; it works in cities like Quito because of the physical model of an open-air marketplace with many small retail spaces in close walking proximity to one another. I'm very skeptical of this claim, it seems like the author has the cause and effect backwards. The physical marketplaces don't exist because there just isn't as big of a market for small furniture makers since labor is much more expensive in the US. (Plus as other commenters point out, few metro areas in the US are as large and dense as a city like Quito, so whatever selection there is will also be scaled down proportionally in most areas). My now-wife and I still talk about the time years ago when we first moved in together. We needed a couch and walked into a small boutique furniture store in Brooklyn. They had this oversized, soft leather couch that I still to this day remember as the most comfortable couch I've ever sat on. The salesperson came over and started explaining how these are hand-made by one guy in North Carolina, we can choose the exact leather in the color/style we want and the craftsman will sit down at his bench and begin building the couch specifically for us. It was quite a compelling pitch but the couch was almost $6000 which we couldn't afford, so we thanked her and went over to Macy's where we bought a still very nice leather couch for under $800 to be delivered 3 days later. You can absolutely get a boutique, small-batch, hand-made version of almost anything in the US. But we're so used to the prices that mass-production make possible that the vast majority of people are unwilling to pay for it. One interesting thing though, is with the internet and direct to consumer brands, and improvements in manufacturing (or at least in easier access to cheap manufacturing), it seems like there are more affordably priced alternatives to big box stores now than there have been for the past few decades. It's a little weird to write an article about furniture buying habits in 2020 that ignores the massive rise of companies like Casper, for instance. The last time I bought a couch I bought it on Wayfair, which was incredibly simple and it arrived just as I expected. It sounds like the author had quite a memorable adventure in Ecuador, but it definitely also sounded like a stressful day of running around, and at least to me ordering online is a much more pleasant alternative.