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I came to the same conclusion. The article explains why small-scale U.S. furniture businesses must court designers, and the customers who employ them. It explai

I came to the same conclusion. The article explains why small-scale U.S. furniture businesses must court designers, and the customers who employ them. It explains essentially what we all know: You can't build furniture at-scale with U.S. wages. I'd be curious to know how a robotic factory for mass-producing furniture would be able to compete with overseas salaries.

jonstewart 4y ago
You can’t build -cheap- furniture at scale with US wages. It is only relatively recently that furniture became cheap. Historically it was expensive, and it was built to last, and it was handed down between generations. Furniture-as-fashion is a fantastic way to go broke, and hugely wasteful.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  Furniture in the old days was like cars: a way to show off. (Rich) people would have their guests tour their homes so they could show off all the expensive, hand-made custom furniture.
linuxftw 4y ago
You absolutely can build competitive furniture products at US wages. Companies that outsource overseas might only be seeing a 5% greater margin, but it's enough to move production because that's money that goes straight to the executives.
- Workaccount2 4y ago
  I don't know about furniture, but in my industry where we have mechanical and electronic stuff built both domestically and in china, the difference in pricing is _insane_. It's not uncommon for things to be a difference of 10x, or 1000% more expensive to be built in the US. And it's not like these shops in the US are swimming in cash. The infrastructure (for manufacturing) sucks and the labor is much more expensive. And frankly the quality has been slipping a lot too, Chinese stuff is now often overall better quality at a fraction the cost. Perhaps if you are a megacorp and can arrange economical supply lines and leverage economies of scale, you can get down to small differences. But for small to medium production runs, China is just so overwhelmingly dominant.

jonstewart 4y ago

You can’t build -cheap- furniture at scale with US wages. It is only relatively recently that furniture became cheap. Historically it was expensive, and it was built to last, and it was handed down between generations. Furniture-as-fashion is a fantastic way to go broke, and hugely wasteful.

midoridensha 4y ago
Furniture in the old days was like cars: a way to show off. (Rich) people would have their guests tour their homes so they could show off all the expensive, hand-made custom furniture.

linuxftw 4y ago

You absolutely can build competitive furniture products at US wages. Companies that outsource overseas might only be seeing a 5% greater margin, but it's enough to move production because that's money that goes straight to the executives.

Workaccount2 4y ago
I don't know about furniture, but in my industry where we have mechanical and electronic stuff built both domestically and in china, the difference in pricing is _insane_. It's not uncommon for things to be a difference of 10x, or 1000% more expensive to be built in the US. And it's not like these shops in the US are swimming in cash. The infrastructure (for manufacturing) sucks and the labor is much more expensive. And frankly the quality has been slipping a lot too, Chinese stuff is now often overall better quality at a fraction the cost. Perhaps if you are a megacorp and can arrange economical supply lines and leverage economies of scale, you can get down to small differences. But for small to medium production runs, China is just so overwhelmingly dominant.