15 ms·

Parable of the Sofa

• kgeist 2y ago
  >Sofas made in the past 15 years or so are absolute garbage, constructed of sawdust compressed and bonded with cheap glue, simple brackets in place of proper joinery, substandard spring design, flimsy foam, and a lot of staples. Interesting, I didn't know it's the case everywhere, not only in my country. Several beds/sofas we bought in the last 5-10 years had such poor quality they cracked in multiple places already and had to be fixed or replaced. Meanwhile a bed produced in 1970 changed 3 owners and still was in perfect condition when we replaced it (for the only reason of looking "oudated", which I regret now).
  • sokoloff 2y ago
    High quality furniture is still being made and sold, just not for $300 for a couch. Cheap shit is going to be cheap shit. Growing up, furniture was something that was expensive, carefully shopped for, and hand delivered fully assembled. I see the availability of cheap (to make and to transport) furniture as filling a gap in the market previously not addressed, but if you’re in a position to buy a piece you’d like to keep 15 years, maybe IKEA and Wayfair aren’t the right furniture vendor for you. High quality furniture wasn’t an inflation-adjusted $300/couch back then either.
    • roughly 2y ago
      The challenge right now is that even the expensive stuff is cheap shit. It’s goddamn near impossible to actually assess the quality of an item you’re purchasing, and the only guarantee is that if it’s a good quality product today, someone will recognize the brand has equity and financial engineer it into crap tomorrow.
      • Lio 2y ago
        This is the MBA curse. Some bright spark will recognise that they can make a short term profit by cheapening the product but retaining the high price. ...but if they don't then other firms selling crappy (but "good enough") products cheap will still drive quality products out of the market. To stay even slight competitive quality manufacturers will avoid investing in new processes or equipment so that they can sell what they currently make slightly cheaper. Either way the products go to shit.
        • geodel 2y ago
          There is same story from Sofa to software. Though in here and many other tech oriented forums there is pretty popular support for crappy, slow, buggy software. Sometimes even with this hilarious veiled thread that imagine what would happen if this software would not even exist if it were not of this quality? No one really told them that world would be better place, you dummy.
      • MeImCounting 2y ago
        Its not as hard to recognize good craftsmanship in furniture as in other types of products. https://www.thosmoser.com/ https://www.thosmoser.com/
        • portaouflop 2y ago
          I don’t see why that should be the case. As someone who rarely/never buys furniture I have no idea what good craftsmanship looks like in the finished product.
          • db48x 2y ago
            You can recognize particleboard, can’t you? That’s low quality. Cardboard covered with wood veneer is another trick, but you can recognize that by its unnatural lightness. Low quality again. Then look at the joints between pieces. If the wood is shaped so that the pieces fit into each other, then that is high quality. If they are joined by screws, metal plates, or glue, then that is low quality (or medium, in some cases). It’s not really that hard, although of course with a couch the upholstery can hide a lot of sins.
            • portaouflop 2y ago
              Fair enough. I do know that heavy furniture is probably higher quality. But that’s about it. Not sure if I would spot particleboard, since it’s hidden under paint or as you said veneer. My only realistic quality criteria are: - does it look old? - is it very heavy?
              • db48x 2y ago
                FWIW, MDF with a veneer is a higher quality than MDF with paint. Also, you can tell when there is a veneer by looking at the edges and corners.
      • condiment 2y ago
        There's plenty of good furniture out there, made by plenty of good brands that haven't sold out. We seem to have forgotten that brands build cachet for a lot of reasons, quality being only one of them. The main issue today is that we've inadvertently traded off quality for variety - there's a huge variety of furniture being made, in every conceivable style, size, and texture. But if you want good stuff, you have to pay in time and money to get it, and you might not be able to get exactly what you want. Which is why it's strange to see people surprised that their $3,800 CB2 sectional isn't built to the same standard of quality as a $13,000 Roche Bobois sectional. Especially when they could have easily gone to the showroom and lifted a section up by a corner to learn exactly what they were buying. Or gone online and searched for clones, or called up any interior decorator in the region and just asked "where do I get a good couch?"
    • bryanrasmussen 2y ago
      Yeah... maybe, theoretically you could assess if the expensive furniture was crap or not but in practice it's problematic, so you pay for some expensive crap. Also the thing is that IKEA hollowed out the middle market, there is only cheap crap, medium crap but still crap, expensive crap that masquerades as expensive quality, and expensive quality. The sofa that the author bought was not expensive quality, it was medium quality. Medium quality is good enough for just about anything but it probably isn't beautiful and high quality. The stuff you are seeing around from the old days in that are more sturdy than modern things are generally not the expensive stuff, because that stuff is still expensive. It's the medium stuff. There is no longer any more medium stuff. Thanks, IKEA. On edit: feelings on matter may be colored by living in Denmark, which may be more affected by IKEA than other countries (proximity to Sweden, Danish habit of everyone agreeing on one way of doing things and then there is no other way)
      • TeMPOraL 2y ago
        It's not Denmark-specific. Hollowing out the middle has happened across every product and service class everywhere in the west. It's a broad problem, in no way limited to sofas.
        • bryanrasmussen 2y ago
          I figured, but observations outside Denmark are on my side shallow ones.
    • spondylosaurus 2y ago
      IKEA shelves and stuff are cheap (in both senses of the word, generally, although some pieces do hold up surprisingly well), but their couches in particular are somehow both crazy expensive and wildly uncomfortable. I remember trying one in the showroom that felt like a massive hard frame with some sagging cushions tacked on, and it was about a thousand bucks.
      • modeless 2y ago
        A thousand bucks isn't crazy expensive. This guy spent ~$6,000 (inflation adjusted) on this couch he thinks is so great.
        • spondylosaurus 2y ago
          It's expensive relative to other couches I've bought that were (1) way more comfortable and (2) way more attractive for a similar or lower price point. In the past I've had $500 couches from Living Spaces that were both cute and felt good to sit on. Better construction too. $6k is still wild though, lol. I've also never really cared for leather couches, so spending that much on one is unthinkable to me, but maybe leather is just more expensive than I realized...?
    • downWidOutaFite 2y ago
      The mid-tier has been hollowed out keeping prices high but increasing the profit margin. From the Dwell article: > Today’s $1,000 sofa is not in the same league of construction as a $299 Sears sofa (about $1,100 today) from 1980. That thing was made of actual wood.
• bad_username 2y ago
  > Late Capitalism: Check check fucking check. I think the author would stop blaming capitalism after seeing the atrocious sofas of the late socialist Soviet Union, which wete not only worse than anything, but also the only choice.
  • Paul-Craft 2y ago
    It's easy to criticize his conclusion when you leave out all the evidence for said conclusion: > But the subtext is drearily familiar. Globalization: Check. Cheap-labor arbitrage: Check. Tax engineering: Check. High profits: Check. Flat-packing: Check. Do you deny that any or all of this is happening, today, under capitalism? Do you deny that there are incentives for any or all of this under capitalism today? Do you deny that these things would lead to the inevitable quality decline he's lamenting? Let's not have any more of your straw man attacks. Attack the real issue instead.
    • XorNot 2y ago
      He spent $1100 CAD getting his sofa reupholstered, and the sofa itself cost over $3,000 CAD in 1999 according to the article (so about $5,000 today). Cheap things are cheaply made isn't news. But being able to have them at all, is for a lot of people, very valuable. What is not in the article is what would $5,000 buy him today? He doesn't know because he didn't go looking. The linked article in the article is someone talking about reupholstering a $1,000 sofa. EDIT: I mean hell, that article wants to talk about a $300 1965 Sears Sofa... In 2024 USD that's almost $3,000.
      • Paul-Craft 2y ago
        He does have some idea what $5k would get him. He mentions that a new, well-made, leather-upholstered sofa would run 5 figures, so, at least $10k. That makes re-upholstering the economically rational choice over both a new $5k sofa and a hypothetical, same quality version of the 1965 Sears sofa. I don't see what your point is.
        • 2y ago
• lencastre 2y ago
  Pay peanuts get monkeys.
• MeImCounting 2y ago
  Just gotta get some Gomer Bolstrood. In all honesty I have no desire for furniture not made by someone I know or alternately made by some New England craftsman who gets paid more than I do and either way I want furniture that will last at least the next hundred years. I have no desire for furniture that my grandchildren wont spend a couple days fighting over.
  • Brybry 2y ago
    My experience is that there's a high probability they won't have space for it, or the will to refurbish it, and it will be sold in a garage sale or even thrown away on the curb.
  • robocat 2y ago
    > furniture that my grandchildren wont spend a couple days fighting over. Mayhap your grandpa said the same about his now worthless piano or car. In my experience grandchildren don't usually want their grandparent's furniture... That is why you can buy it so cheaply at the second hand shop. That expensive sofa ends up at the dump not the vintage store: nobody wants it. If you want classic furniture then buy the best second hand stuff. Why bother getting it made?
• Simon_ORourke 2y ago
  The irony being that this very site's boosting of that store, in a modern web-driven sense, is likely to see all sorts of increased business for said store. Not that it's a bad thing, I'd like to see them getting all business they can handle. But there's a spectrum between the lifestyle capitalism stores like this and the VC-backed unicorns.
  • timbray 2y ago
    That crossed my mind when I saw the piece show up on HN. But I think they're already running more or less at capacity.
• monero-xmr 2y ago
  The wonderful thing about the free market is that consumers have choice. There is indeed a large market for high quality products at a higher price. Old brands become shitty, and new brands pop up. Bernie Sanders, a famous modern-day socialist, is famous for saying we don’t need so many brands of deodorant: https://fortune.com/2024/02/12/too-many-products-bernie-sanders-deodorant-coca-cola-dollar-stores/ https://fortune.com/2024/02/12/too-many-products-bernie-sand... This is where I fundamentally disagree. Only the market, where consumers put their hard-earned dollars at work, can tell us how many brands of deodorant are needed. From skin sensitivity to smell to the chemical makeup, I don’t want a government bureaucrat deciding the “correct” number of deodorant brands. I want as many as the market sees fit. Extending that principle outwards, the market will decide the type of sofas that can be made, and at what price.
  • GolfPopper 2y ago
    The framing of 'government bureaucrat' vs. 'consumer choice' is at best misleading. As lordnacho pointed out, such a free market only works for consumers when the consumers have real agency. We exist in a state of immense information asymmetry, where vendors have immense advantages over the buyers. (Immense resources focused on highly misleading marketing vs. individual expertise, with attempts by consumers to organize frequently hijacked.) I shouldn't need to be a domain expert in order to make an informed choice. The level of acceptance of a "free market" overwhelmingly dominating by deceptive marketing is insane.
    • stana 2y ago
      Yes. We are heavily manipulated by the media to think that we need 20 brands of deodorant. I think this is the subject of Herman/Chomsky book "Manufacturing Consent" (from a more political angle but I think applies to advertising as well) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent (edited typo)
      • defrost 2y ago
        A solid part of that book goes to the notion that "the media" are also manipulated | shaped by external forces .. economics leading them to often take the path of least resistance for greatest return. The linked wikipedia overview lists 5 key points (of the authers outline) of the "Propaganda model of communication" and lists the government and the advertisers having a powerful shaping force on the media.
• gorgoiler 2y ago
  One exception that proves the rule: the best sofa we ever had was a hand me down from Pottery Barn c. 2009 made of softwood and particle board with stapled on polyester velour. Extremely easy to clean, easy to take apart, and easy to re-assemble. It cracked in the middle but I reinforced the frame and added extra feet and the design meant the re-stapled fabric covered all my bodges quite neatly. Yes, modern furniture is crap and there is an epidemic of junk sold at fancy prices. If you reframe your crappy sofa as purchasing a sofa kit and pay a reasonable not-West-Elm price for it then it doesn’t seem so bad after all.
• lordnacho 2y ago
  This is something that has bothered me for a while. When we're discussing capitalism, people seem to get it in their head that it's either what we have now, or you can fuck off to North Korea. How I would characterize my ideal economy is one where the feedback loop works: people can make reasonable guesses about what a product is, how long it will work for, and what its cost is. They can adjust their purchases according to their needs, which tells us which products should exist and which should not. Businesses do not trick the customers into thinking a thing has more value than it actually does. A very large part of this economy is accurate information, and a very large part of accurate information is trust. After all nobody is going to know more about the product than the people who made it, and they will always have an interest in representing their product in the most positive light. Lemon problem. The thing that seems to characterize the economy now is that businesses will violate your trust in order to make money. They know that you won't read the license agreement when you sign up for a service, and they will use that. They know that you won't be checking what kind of joins your sofa has. They know that you won't get as much value from their items as the adverts say. All of these abuses can be done within the law, perhaps because these same businesses are involved with shaping the law. The feedback loop is broken, and this leads to the same problem as what the Soviet Union had. Their problem wasn't that people were lazy and didn't go to work. Their problem was that they made the wrong stuff. Things that nobody wanted, often with the same quality issues as what you get these days buying an item from a market economy. Note that GDP figures will still not know this, it just sees all the crap and counts the money paid for it. Often we pick on MBAs when it comes to this sort of critique, and there's some merit to it. If your only goal is to make money, and the economy is riddled with loopholes where you can make money without providing value, then we will have an economy that doesn't provide a lot of value, because MBAs are really good at finding these types of things.
  • refulgentis 2y ago
    This sort of thing is satisfying to write and even more satisfying to read and nod along to. But it's paper-thin histrionics. "an ad said I'd value something and I didn't" and "I didn't read the license agreement" are trans-mutated into "abuse" that should obviously be illegal, and somehow become grist for all sorts of grand invocations, GDP, capitalism, MBAs, North Korea... You're free to check what joins your sofa has. In fact, we all seem pretty well-informed on that. God bless the info markets. It is legal to make cheaper sofas than artisanal leather couches with joins approved by a FAANG employee. God bless the sofa market.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• bratwurst3000 2y ago
  May I add, cheap shit will always win if most people don’t have the initial money to spend on quality. A 400€ dollar shitcouch seems better than no couch at all.
• bunnie 2y ago
  The bit about "lifestyle business" always being uttered in contempt resonated with me. I always assumed it was just me being overly sensitive to folks expressing concern over my life choices, urging me to snap out of my "mid-life crisis" and do something "useful" like raise money and scale up, or "apply myself" at famous institutions with "real impact".
  • verisimi 2y ago
    > In conversation with venture capitalists, you hear the phrase “lifestyle business”, meaning one that is doing nicely and rewarding the people who run it and which isn’t planning for unbounded growth. The words “lifestyle business” are always, of course, uttered in a voice dripping with contempt. This makes me wonder what other type of business is there? How do VCs describe their business, what is their aim? Is it to be 'king of the world'? Have more money than god? Have power to control others? If that's it, lifestyle businesses sound much more human. Who wants to pretend to be god, rather than being oneself?
    • throwaway2562 2y ago
      The contemptuous phrase ‘lifestyle business’ is just VCs saying the quiet part out loud. You want to run a company that feeds your family and provides some decent stable jobs, indefinitely? You must be a clown, they think. The other memorably awful/ macho bullshit line I once personally heard when pitching an idea to a young thruster was: “Who gets fired?” by which the guy meant, whose jobs are on the line if you build your business successfully? Not all games are zero-sum, I had to tell him.
      • bunnie 2y ago
        I think maybe it's the case that the VC's biggest competition for top talent and good ideas are from the innovators that they hope to invest in. If they encourage a thousand lifestyle business bloom, one might turn into a boot-strapped "unicorn" that didn't take their money, so it's in their own interest to make lifestyle businesses seem like a terrible idea. The more talented people are convinced the only way to start a business is with VC, the higher a value VCs can extract from talented people. If we actually had more socially acceptable options, more folks would have the leverage to walk away from the table and shove the VC's non-competes, non-disclosures, preferred shares and meddling board seats in their face.
• rPlayer6554 2y ago
  How is "modern capitalism" to blame? Modern capitalism allowed a small business to sell you the higher quality option, and you were able to direct your purchasing power to the product you wanted. If you convince more consumers to do the same (like you are) big brands will loose money and change. That's capitalism. The best term I can come up with to describe the phenomenon you dislike is _modern consumerism_ (although not perfectly accurate). Many people now want more new stuff cheaper. That's what drives companies to produce things more cheaply.
  • eastbound 2y ago
    The capitalist part is that the new options aren’t even cheaper anymore, but the manufacturer has cheapened out on material quality “because it earns more money”. However, one can blame capitalism, but the soviets also used to cheap out on material quality, shops, distribution, wages and maximize bribery.
    • immibis 2y ago
      The Soviets were pretty capitalist. They just had an extra rule, that said only Dear Leader was allowed to have all the capital. Apart from that they worked the same way as any corporation while trying to pretend they were not exactly like a corporation (which is also something corporations do).
  • hamandcheese 2y ago
    > Many people now want more new stuff cheaper. Yes of course, and that's why our grandparents got fewer things that cost more, because that's what they wanted.
  • TeMPOraL 2y ago
    I think there's a mistake in your assumptions, in that the system delivers what people want. The feedback loop is broken; most sectors seem to be supplier-driven, which means people choose fuck all. Customers don't choose from space of possible goods of a given type - they choose out of what's currently available. It's increasingly hard for a quality good to compete now, when the competition can make shit stuff for much cheaper and lie to the customers about it being quality.
• satisfice 2y ago
  Hooray for lifestyle businesses! I started my company in 1999 with my wife and I around the kitchen table. My vision: a consulting company that never told a lie to a client. With that philosophy and 25 years of work we have built the company into two people around the same kitchen table.
  • nakedneuron 2y ago
    Hooray to sound joins, I guess.
  • piloto_ciego 2y ago
    That is admirable though. I ran a little consultancy for a few years - it never exploded in size or grew beyond me, but I could always look myself in the mirror.
• contrarian1234 2y ago
  If you get out of the US bubble, the prices are simply insane fix a sofa: it's equivalent to a month's salary/stipend here in Asia. 200 bowls of noodle (if it's a cheap noodle then it's more like 500) new sofa: "new leather sofas of the “not flat-packed sawdust and glue” variety quickly get into five figures" So like a year's worth of stipend/expenses Could be that just the US dollar is crazy - but until the economic disbalances of the world doesn't equilibrate (that's on a centenial scale), it's never going to make sense to fix a sofa "But I’d sure vote for a political party that convinced me it was trying to achieve that" The only way you can achieve this is by going full North Korea and self sufficient. There is no real upside to this fantasy
  • tmnvix 2y ago
    A significant portion of the cost is labour, so if you translate that into a local non-US cost does it still seem absurd? I may have misunderstood your point, but I don't think it is a good argument for why running a business fixing things using local labour should be a fantasy. Aside from that, in my view a world where a sofa costs less than one weeks wages is the absurd and unsustainable one. We've adopted an attitude of being incredibly entitled to cheap tat and that needs to stop.
    • contrarian1234 2y ago
      I think there are two issues that are going in parallel 1. fixing stuff As long as some dude on the other side of the world is willing to make a new sofa and send it to you for cheaper than it is to fix it locally, the idea of fixing it locally will just never take off. You can ban/limit international trade, but then you're just screwing over poor people on the other end of the world for a "feel good" kind of thing 2. not making cheap crap You can find some way to disincentivize making cheap stuff. Ban IKEA.. etc. But then you are just making life harder for the poor in your own country. That's cool you can afford a 5 figure quality sofa.. many people in the US won't be able to afford that. It just comes off as a bit heartless as well when rich programmer types deplore the quality of cheap things. There are the five figure sofas if you want. Go buy them - nobody is stopping you. You don't have to force everyone else into that price bracket though The two things aren't disconnected. But in the end it seems like rich people want to ban cheap things, so that they can have more local repair services for their expensive stuff
• crawfishphase 2y ago
  you can also have the leather refinished instead of replacing it. they fill the cracks etc and touch up the "paint". I like this look more but ymmv depending what is available near you
  • philjohn 2y ago
    Also depends on the leather. If it's aniline, there's little they can do. That's also the nicest leather for a sofa (IMHO) as it breathes and so doesn't get uncomfortable to sit in when the weather is warm.
  • moffkalast 2y ago
    Or use fabric instead of leather, which is both cheaper and doesn't feel like you're sitting on rubbery plastic. I honestly don't get the appeal. Actual plastic (i.e. synthetic fibers) ironically feels so much nicer.
• xorax 2y ago
  IKEA warranty most of its sofa 10 years now. But I doubt any other large furniture store will do the same.
  • eloisant 2y ago
    That's the thing, if it's good quality a sofa should last a lifetime and still be usable. Not just 10 years. Of course you'll need to change the leather or do other repairs at times like Tim did, but we have to get out of this mentality of "things have a lifetime of x years then you need to throw them away".
• baggy_trough 2y ago
  This is like people complaining about how air travel sucks compared to the time you could get a rib roast carved in the aisle in the 1960s. Markets have determined that people prefer cheaper, shoddier sofas compared to expensive high quality sofas. If you don't believe that, then go into business as a high quality sofa factory.
  • jodrellblank 2y ago
    In the same way that markets have determined that people ‘prefer’ renting small mouldy damp apartments and eating noodles than buying penthouse apartments and eating at five star restaurants?
    • baggy_trough 2y ago
      No, not like that.
  • TeMPOraL 2y ago
    > If you don't believe that, then go into business as a high quality sofa factory. You can't, because your competitors have well-staffed marketing departments that can convince people their shit sofas are actually quality, sell them significantly cheaper than you could sell yours. They have more experience at this, much wider reach than you or any other upstart. It's hard to compete on quality when dishonesty is legal.
  • mokanfar 2y ago
    Most of today's world furniture comes from -----. Most of the problems in the furniture market today deal with a trend that middle class try to imitate the rich interior design look and feel. The uneducated consumer is surrounded by a market ----- created demand for which is furniture knockoffs of fashion furniture brands that you see in Interior Design Magazines. The furniture is built with poor materials, and dangerous chemicals treating finishes and frame construction. Almost all faux finishes (veneer, marble, concrete, leather, stone etc...) is made with really bad ingredients to give it the overall look and feel to the real texture they are trying to imitate. The fashion brand furniture keeps evolving as a fashion brand should even when it comes to furniture. Therefore, furniture is a trend market, where people can afford it. Where people can not afford it, they fill their space with the knockoff furniture, realize it is not good quality, accumulate enough money to repeat the cycle with another poorly manufactured replacement. This is what is driving most of the demand today to keep churning out low price-point furniture for the newly emerging middle working class of today's world that do not understand what really goes on behind the scenes of how their furniture gets made, or maybe they don't care. The other furniture market is for people who, as others commented, leave furniture pieces to their children. Those groups do not care about fashion, as with people that just need clothes to walk around not caring about the brand that they are advertising. There is still good affordable furniture out there. Hand-built with care and precision as a Rolls-Royce car would be in the factory, mostly small companies in Italy and other parts of the world still to this day make great long-lasting pieces. The locality of the furniture manufacturer matters on the price significantly. Shipping logistics for furniture is a nightmare.
• nakedneuron 2y ago
  Quality (or the lack thereof) as a hidden property seems to be a man-made artifact. Are there any examples in nature (excluding mankind) coming up with this? Evolution doesn't seem to choose this path. Why do we?
  • TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Plummage and other external indicators of fitness, which animals use to game the mating game? Still, nature is first and foremost red in tooth and claw. Fighting for survival has a magical ability to cut through all the bullshit and reveal things for what they are. Quality won't stay hidden for long if it's directly relevant to you eating your next meal, instead of becoming one. Related, I believe this is why humanity seems to have made major leaps in science and technology during and after military conflicts. But the stakes matter. When people ordering and funding the research are really worried about losing, you get amazing pace of innovation. When they're not, you get amazing pace of fraud.
    • waciki 2y ago
      > this is why humanity seems to have made major leaps in science and technology during and after military conflicts Did it? I can't really find numbers on that.
      • throwawayFinX 2y ago
        I think it’s broadly accepted that WW2 forced or accelerated inventions such as: jet planes, radios, synthetic rubber, radar, the Jeep, duct tape, nukes. The cold war -> the space race. Drone tech/military AI in Ukraine is perhaps a more recent example.
    • nakedneuron 2y ago
      I think immediacy is key here. A bad sofa that falls apart after five years of use is a delayed loss (that fallacy has to have be discovered already). A small investment, prospects of gambling it and the inability to see through seem to play a role so lottery (poor people's tax) comes to mind. > pace of fraud Isn't it if the stakes are high more eyes are watching and thus quality control works (better)? I'm at a loss for scenarios that would raise the bar for the sofa game. A shabby sofa could signal something about the owner that might be indirectly relevant to the mating success. But on the other hand there seems to be a niche for that market where low quality fits quite well.
• thrance 2y ago
  It's weird how many people here will shout against any (assumed) critic of capitalism. "So you want to live in North Korea???". No, I don't. What I want is a system where we can get quality products that are not manufactured by slaves on the other side of the world, and that didn't require burning 3 bathtubs of gasoline. And our system definitely ain't it.
  • immibis 2y ago
    There are two types of countries observable in the world today: ones that are shit like capitalism, and ones that are shit like North Korea.
    • thrance 2y ago
      Good luck convincing the chinese worker that made your phone of the merits of capitalism.
      • tristor 2y ago
        It’s funny you say that, because the primary beneficiaries of capitalism have been exactly those workers over the past four decades. While not good for American workers, off-shoring and outsourcing have lifted over a billion people out of poverty since the 1980s. China had the fastest growing middle class in the world, so much so, that as a buying market they’re absorbing the entire stock of many categories of high quality or luxury goods that are preferred by the middle class. The Chinese worker making my phone may hate their job for similar or different reasons than the investment banker, both who famously have jumped from buildings due to work stress, both famously faces of capitalism. But, that Chinese worker is now able to provide for their family including their education and onward advancement in a way that wasn’t possible before. Since the 1980s China has been speed running the Industrial Revolution, with massive cities forming of people who were almost entirely in rural areas previously in abject poverty and doing subsistence agriculture, all of whom now work jobs that have elevated them out of that poverty. You can say a lot of truthful negative things about capitalism but pointing to manufacturing jobs in China is completely missing the thread.
• jll29 2y ago
  Of course from a venture capitalist's perspective, running a lifestyle business is the ultimate failure: not only don't they get their investment back with a nice 40x return, but also they cannot write off the investment as a loss as long as the business keeps going. This is not a judgment about lifestlye businesses per se, it's just not a match for risk capital regarding funding.
• agomez314 2y ago
  I liked the outcome of the article but disagree with the author’s misplaced anger. “Capitalism” is not some entity that makes decisions, it’s people and groups who do. You want to blame someone? Blame the policies, programs, and choices (some intentional, others unintentional) of those who decided it was better to make things cheap than to make things well. This is not a capitalist idea, it is a human decision.
  • draw_down 2y ago
    [dead]
• Micoloth 2y ago
  Every time I read takes like this I think people forget why big brands exist? Small business (or “lifestyle business”) vs big brand is often framed about being high quality vs cheap price, because in practice it often is. But in theory the two things are completely unrelated. Yes fixing stuff is good for the planet. But big brands could offer customer service just fine if people wanted it. Small business vs big brand is a problem of predictability. If you have many independent small businesses, NOT all of them will be good. It will be a mixed bag what you get in your area. OP has felt so fortunate with his local highly-skilled asian-owned small business that he felt compelled to write about it on the internet. Not everyone will be this lucky. And in a world where information travels very fast (this is really the key point) this system is unsustainable, as there are really only 2 options: either people accept the fact that some neighbourhoods are served worse than others, or the take the car and make the travel up to the nice asian shop they read about on the internet, because that’s apparently worth it. But, surprise, this second option doesn't scale. Because as soon as the nice asian shop goes viral, they realise they can’t keep up with the demand at all. And so they will probably refuse lots of customers. (Note, I’m not even considering the option they might increase prices) In this sense, the derogatory “lifestyle business” comment makes sense, since I think it’s meant to highlight how elitist it is. It doesn't scale in the sense that it creates a race for who is able to cop the best option. When I need a sofa, I want to be able to “just” get a sofa. Simple and predictable. If the sofa is good quality, even better.
  • 082349872349872 2y ago
    > When I need a sofa, I want to be able to “just” get a sofa. Simple and predictable. If the sofa is good quality, even better. So, how often do you eat at McDo? (whose entire value proposition is "just" get some calories, simply and predictably)
    • throw0101c 2y ago
      > So, how often do you eat at McDo? Just because you want to "'just' get a sofa" it does not follow that you "'just' get some food" as well. Or at least not always: sometimes you may 'just' want to, and sometimes you'll want something more that 'just' calories. And you may not care about sofas as compared to other things: you may 'just' want a sofa, but if you're really into cooking then you may want more than (say) 'just' some random knife, perhaps going for hand-forge Japanese steel. Further, the cost of making a mistake with food (a few (dozen) dollars) versus a mistake with a sofa (hundreds/thousands) are on two different levels.
• aebtebeten 2y ago
  > I’m not smart enough to figure out what the regulatory regime is that would ban most of what private-equity does and tilt the playing field in favor of resilient lifestyle businesses. When I discovered a polity full of SMEs and resilient lifestyle businesses, I immigrated here. Some vague thoughts from a few decades of trying to figure out specifically why it seems to work so much better than the Old Country: Resilient family farms: that is indeed hefty regulation, as well as willingness to forgo the last percentage point or two of economic efficiency. Resilient lifestyle businesses: the apprenticeship system plays some role here, and I bet the same consideration to efficiency applies? I guess part of it depends upon who's making the investment decisions: - Owners are often happy to shave off a few percentage points in favour of intangible benefits. - Workers (here, the term includes outside management) are less happy, as they're agents, and a few points for the owner may be 20-50% of the agents' vig. - Finance types run at full efficiency or nothing, as their entire business is built around picking up nickels in front of the steamroller, you can't expect them to leave nickels around that are only in the path of tricycles. Final thought: if you want a lot of new businesses, fast, you're going to get "late capitalism" and the goods & services equivalent of row crops. If you've had your economy for some time and are just fiddling at the edges for growth, you can have a bunch of lifestyle businesses, the goods & services equivalent of orchards. (I once lived in a neighbourhood in the Old Country that still had corner stores, because it was older than the automobile, and although "late capitalism" prevents corner stores from arising in new neighbourhoods it's more or less neutral towards existing ones) EDIT: for exact identities, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39861369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39861369 and my comment history more generally, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Scarry#Personal_life_and_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Scarry#Personal_life_a... Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reuJ8yVCgSM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reuJ8yVCgSM (2017)
  • shnock 2y ago
    To which places are you referring?
  • selimthegrim 2y ago
    Curious minds want to know of where you speak…
• po 2y ago
  > How would we get there from here? I’m not smart enough to figure out what the regulatory regime is that would ban most of what private-equity does and tilt the playing field in favor of resilient lifestyle businesses. One good way is to pay attention to the details, learn how things are made (YouTube helps with this!) and not be impressed by shitty work, in general. I buy plenty of MDF-built products but I also know the difference. There are just so many people who have no idea.
  • abhayhegde 2y ago
    That is a good point. I would also think that buyers must vote with their money. Stop buying cheaply made products as much as possible, when an alternative slightly-expensive yet well made things exist. Of course, easier said than done, especially when money is a constraint.
• MarkusWandel 2y ago
  I call it the "billion dollars or bust" mentality. The attitude that a <1% chance of making it really big outweights a near 100% chance of a comfortably profitable business for yourself and a modest number of others.
• azubinski 2y ago
  Well, it started with: "So we had them replaced, at a fair price, by a small local business. Which is something that modern capitalism is trying to make impossible" And then there was lot of blah-blah-blah about small local business which thanks to those "modern capitalism" is possible and exists. But what is "fair price" is still unknown from whose point of view it is fair. So, let use the same style (it is the style, yeah): If you want to rise popularity of your blog in many modern capitalism countries, always start any blog record with any form of modern capitalism blaming :)
  • mariusor 2y ago
    > If you want to rise popularity of your blog in many modern capitalism countries, always start any blog record with any form of modern capitalism blaming As this forum is mostly populated with techies, one would hope Tim Bray is a known name which doesn't need increasing his blog's popularity, or being suspect of pulling such stunts. :)
• karolist 2y ago
  It boils down to giving people freedom but the world is being destroyed or communism (it has its own problems).
• dangus 2y ago
  I would point out that the original Dwell article cited by the author as unequivocal evidence of the decline of sofa quality is entirely based on the opinion of a single upholstery guy. This whole idea of “most new furniture suddenly sucks in the past 15 years” is somewhat suspect to me. Maybe it’s survivorship bias or something? Because cheaply furniture definitely existed more than 15 years ago. I found a vintage ad for a “genuine leather” sofa for $799. I.e., the worst kind of leather, the kind with the cracking plasticky texture. I don’t think that sofa would have even reached the upholstery guy, it would have ended up in a dumpster. (Search for Gardner White Vintage Ads on Google Images) That $799 couch in 1990 would now cost $2,000 after inflation. So $2,000 is your baseline for a mass-produced cheap couch (this lines up pretty closely to the $1500 IKEA leather couch I own), which means something more “buy it for life” is going to bring you into that Restoration Hardware territory. And, really, most people aren’t willing to pay that. The second thing I would say is that this idea that modern capitalism wants to stamp out this family business is not supported at all. This whole situation seemed to make their services even more valuable. It’s also a fact that in the US 99.9% of all businesses are small businesses and they employ almost half of all Americans. Yes, you heard that right, it’s really 99.9%. Small businesses are where you’ll find a lot of quality furniture too! Like, you can buy solid wood furniture at good prices from Amish-owned furniture businesses. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/small-business-statistics/ https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/small-business-stati... The third and final point I’d make is that particle board isn’t bad. That isn’t what causes your furniture to fail prematurely. And it has major benefits like being lightweight. My sofa from IKEA is 100% manufactured wood, but that part is totally solid. I’ve owned the couch for a good 10 years now. The weak points of the couch are really the foam, which you don’t really need a complicated upholstery job to replace. It may also even be possible for me to buy the cushion covers from IKEA directly (that’s certainly an option from modular manufacturers like LoveSac).
• vhodges 2y ago
  I am so glad Tim (and thus Luxcious) are in the Lower Mainland. I don't need them currently, but it's nice to know it's an option.
• parpfish 2y ago
  I always thought “lifestyle business” meant something else. In this article it means “small business that supports the lifestyle of its owner/employees” I thought it meant that it was a business that provided a non-essential usually-trendy “lifestyle goods/accessories” for its customers.
  • Joeboy 2y ago
    I thought the "lifestyle business" negativity was chiefly around trendy businesses that are only viable due to being covertly subsidized, eg. by family money.
    • rossdavidh 2y ago
      This is what I hear the phrase "lifestyle business" used for, to distinguish between the immigrant family restaurant (real business that pays the bills of the people who own it) from the "twenty items each on their own display table with a spotlight" store (funded by spouse, trust fund, or money they got when they cashed out of their previous job).
  • bthallplz 2y ago
    Ooh, the term is indeed used differently depending on what it's being discussed in relation to: as in the article, the business's structure itself and its relation to its owner's hopes/expectations for it; or as you pointed to, the industry/market/product or service category of the business's product or service.
  • jannyfer 2y ago
    Same here, but maybe I was thinking of “lifestyle brand” and I’d never actually heard “lifestyle business”.
  • snowwrestler 2y ago
    This article is misusing the term. Every business supports the lifestyle of its employees, by providing them with money and (sometimes) benefits. But that doesn’t mean every business is a “lifestyle business.” What makes a “lifestyle business” is that the owner picks the lifestyle they want first, then designs a business around that. For example someone who wants to go rock climbing all the time is not going to consider a furniture repair shop in a big city to be a “lifestyle business.” Probably few people would consider furniture repair to be a lifestyle business, unless your preferred lifestyle is to do manual labor in a crappy warehouse every day with few vacations. Lifestyle businesses usually take one of a few shapes: - Monetizing the lifestyle directly: for example Instagram influencers who make a business out of their personal travel, fashion, outdoor adventure, etc. - Running a high-leverage business at a low intensity: for example a highly automated SaaS business that is kept small and easy to run, so the owner can spend most of their time doing other things. This is usually what VCs look down on, because they seek out high leverage business models and consider anything less than max intensity to be a wasted opportunity. - Optional businesses: for example low-intensity “consulting” gigs that independently wealthy people operate to keep from being bored, or for tax advantage.
• throw0101c 2y ago
  > This kind of transaction is exactly what modern capitalism is trying to stamp out. The author is attributing intentionality to something that has no free will or even sentience. Capitalism and the market economy are simply people who owns things and who make decisions to buy things. People need/want a certain item, value it to a certain extent, and are willing to part with some number of dollars to receive that value. If a large number of people do not highly value an item (e.g., sofas), then they will not be willing to allocate a large number of dollars towards it, so companies that charge a high dollar amount will not be able to collect them. If you are 'forcing' such companies to exist, then they have to be able to collect monies to not go bankrupt, which basically means you are forcing these high(er) prices onto the public. If the individuals who make up the public are not interested in these high(er)-cost items why should they be forced to pay the money to buy them instead of allocating their dollars to something they do value? (Of course the prices need to reflect all the costs associated with making them, which is where things like (e.g.) carbon pricing comes in for the environment.)
  • TeMPOraL 2y ago
    > The author is attributing intentionality to something that has no free will or even sentience. Capitalism and the market economy are simply people who owns things and who make decisions to buy things. In the same sense the human brain has no intentionality or sentience - it's simply neurons wired together, trading chemicals and jolting each other for shits and giggles. Sometimes a high-level process works in a way not obvious from looking at individual parts, or even dependent on them. See also: corporations are effectively alien minds, AIs executing on top of a runtime made of humans. > People need/want a certain item, value it to a certain extent, and are willing to part with some number of dollars to receive that value. If a large number of people do not highly value an item (...) That breaks down in practice, because people have finite time and energy to evaluate and make choices, while sellers have a lot of leeway in plain lying to their customers. As a result, people mostly chose out of what's available, and quietly endure it being shit.
  • jprete 2y ago
    There's value in identifying what the incentive structure is doing even if it can only be expressed in anthropomorphic terms.
• blfr 2y ago
  > This kind of transaction is exactly what modern capitalism is trying to stamp out. Yet again modern capitalism is blamed for its users' lack of taste: people genuinely prefer new, crappier stuff to classier, old items. This is the same with Tik Tok algos, tailors being unpopular compared to fast fashion and even overpriced luxury brands, fast food vs cooking, etc. Virtually every time a consumer is confronted with a lousier but easily available option and a vastly superior one but requiring some mental, or occasionally physical, effort, they choose the former. Capitalism merely holds up a mirror to our preferences. As it turns out, we really don't like it.
  • ajkjk 2y ago
    > people genuinely prefer new, crappier stuff to classier, old items > Virtually every time a consumer is confronted with a lousier but easily available option and a vastly superior one but requiring some mental, or occasionally physical, effort, they choose the former. No they don't. There's a bunch of information asymmetries and missing choices that make the equilibrium warped and bizarre, rather than revealing anything so simple about society. Sure it's at some local optimum but there can be still be wildly better global optima that the system has trouble reaching.
    • blfr 2y ago
      > There's a bunch of information asymmetries This is what I meant by mental effort. With the advent of the Internet, most of these asymmetries are gated by at most a couple of hours of online research.
      • ajkjk 2y ago
        No there are a lot of asymmetries still. Knowing something is bad easy. Actually having access to something good, and knowing how to shop for it and acquire it and get it an affordable price, is hard. As is knowing, for the producers, that people want certain things and will pay for them, or would pay for them if marketed to correctly.
• istultus 2y ago
  Let me posit an ad-hoc theory built on our anchoring bias in regards to price and our inability to think in terms of inflation/hyperbolic discounting: tl;dr - Once a cheap alternative is on the market, us frugal folks can't imagine paying for what was once the default and only option, distorting our understanding of what constitutes good quality * He says buying a new sofa of the same quality today would cost upwards of $5000, and he paid more than $3000 for it in 1999. He paid $1000 now to reupholster. * Using US inflation data which is easier to access, $3000 in '99 is around $5600 today - so practically unchanged. * What's changed? Since the emergence of cheap badly-built furniture, it now _feels_ profligate to spend $5000 on a sofa, when in 1999 it was (hypothetically) the only option. * Instead people feel better buying a (say) $800 IKEA sofa every 5 years, which over 25 years is the $4000 nominal he has spent on his own sofa. It _feels_ much less painful to give IKEA $800 now than to give your local artisan sofa maker $5000. Who profits from that? You moreso than the local artisan. * It's true that the middle has been hollowed out - I can't find a well-made $1500 sofa, but on the plus side the less affluent have access to cheap sofas, and the affluent but frugal whinge and buy a new sofa every few years. I'm squarely in the frugal bracket, if not affluent...
  • rcpt 2y ago
    The Ikea sofa makes a lot of sense if you don't think you'll stay in the same place for very long.
  • crazygringo 2y ago
    Not to mention that when you pay $5000 for a sofa today, you don't really know if you're actually getting a sofa that will last 25 years or not, because you're not an expert in sofa construction techniques and frankly don't want to become one. So you might get totally ripped off. Whereas if you pay $800 for the IKEA sofa every 5 years, you know you're actually getting what you're paying for. Plus people move apartments, move houses, move cities. Sometimes every 5 years or even more often. The sofa that fit in the old apartment is too wide for the new one. Or the style that made sense in your prewar apartment looks silly in your modernist one. Or now you have kids and you need it to be stain-resistant. Or what felt like a cool trendy leather couch when you were 25 now looks tacky and vulgar to you when you're 34. For a lot of people, a sofa that's a fifth the price, that lasts a fifth as long, isn't a bug -- it's a feature. Quite simply, your sofa needs change.
• frugalmail 2y ago
  This sounds antagonistic and ungrateful. But capitalism offered affordable furniture that got me off the floor with pillows which many places around the world still do. And oh look, if you want that kind of furniture that has joinery, and 8 way tied coils, you buy it too, paying what the level of effort is worth which would probably be mid 5 figures instead of the low 4, or high 3.
• snowwrestler 2y ago
  Folks, not everything is “late stage capitalism.” Furniture repair has been the domain of small businesses forever. And they are in crappy little out of the way places because that’s where real estate is cheap, and they don’t need foot traffic. Customers come find them when they need furniture repaired. Furniture repair is also not a “lifestyle business.” That phrase is not a synonym for small business. Furniture repair is hard work and low margin. Customers are intermittent so it’s hard to take time off (because you risk losing a significant project). A lifestyle business is a business that people set up who are trying to fund their preferred lifestyle. For example, a single person SaaS that creates monthly passive income, like half the people here on HN are trying to set up. I worked for a lifestyle business: the owner was an entrepreneur with 2 successful exits and did not need to work. But he had set up a tech consultancy so he could work on a few interesting projects a year and funnel all his favorite expenses (new tech gadgets, cars, travel, etc) through a tax-advantaged business entity. He picked his lifestyle and then built the business around that. Most small businesses are the other way around: the owner has to adapt their lifestyle to the business, in order to stay in business.
  • PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    I don't fundamentally disagree with what you've written here, but the reality is that we don't have any idea from TFA just what sort of situation Luxcious is actually in. They may be a "just getting by" furniture repair shop, or they may make easily as much as the owners want it to, and in the meantime provides work that they and their employees (if there are any other than the owners) find interesting and/or rewarding. This exists too (even if it may indeed not be the norm).
• amelius 2y ago
  This equally applies to beds and mattresses and kitchens and probably a lot of other furniture-related stuff too.
• drewda 2y ago
  For a post that's about supporting businesses that provide value, it's unfortunate to see a link to bypass a magazine's paywall. (Yes, I'm annoyed when I want to read an interestingly headlined article that first requires a subscription. Yes, I also use archive.is to get around some outlets' paywalls. That said, I do try to pay for the online newspapers and magazines that I read the most, and I think it's worth nudging others in that direction as well.)
• CapitalistCartr 2y ago
  Most businesses in the USA are "lifestyle" businesses, and they are the backbone of our economy. Everywhere I've worked, we had relationships with dozens of them, and the area around us was full of them. We couldn't have succeeded without that ecosystem. Most people who didn't work in the relevant industries didn't even know they were there.
• lkrubner 2y ago
  "This kind of transaction is exactly what modern capitalism is trying to stamp out." Since small businesses lack "economies of scale" they need fat gross margins to survive. In the USA, both the public and the political leadership was frightened of the slow buildup of inflation from 1960 to 1973, and then the explosion of inflation, into double digit territory, for much of the period from 1973 to 1982. After that experience we had a long era, a whole generation of leadership, where the public and the leadership felt the fight against inflation had to be one of the most important economic fights that the government engaged in. And the fight against inflation had to involve the fight against gross margins. So we, as a society, went to war against small businesses, because small businesses survive on the kind of margins that were seen as causing inflation. By contrast, allowing the spread of companies such as WalMart, which benefits from "economies of scale" and so can survive on razor-thin gross margins, was seen as helping to stop inflation. Likewise, opening up the economy to nations such as China was seen as an important step to limit inflation. The cost structure in China was such that a company in China could have fat gross margins and yet still underprice a company in the USA that had thin gross margins. Thus importing from China became an important part of the war against inflation. All of this worked for awhile. The era from 1982 to 2008 was known as The Great Moderation, an era when inflation fell and the business cycle moderated. And the era after 2008 also saw rock bottom inflation -- inflation remained under the Fed's 2% target for several years after 2008. Under President Trump, the USA began to adapt a new economic policy, and President Biden has continued forward with the Trump policies. The new era has seen increasing tariffs on China and a willingness to rethink some aspects of the open trade policies that we followed for most of 50 years. And since 2000, starting under Trump and then continuing under Biden, we have seen several trillion worth of stimulus spending. This has revived inflation, but it has also allowed many small businesses to raise prices and thus re-attain the kinds of gross margins they need to survive. In general, a society can have the lowest possible prices, or it can have prices that are high enough to support small businesses, but it cannot have both. Since America is a large, diverse nation we will never have agreement about what our priorities should be, but we should keep in mind, we did some real damage to ourselves during the decades that we eliminated inflation and we are gifting ourselves some real benefits during this current era of inflation.
• nakedneuron 2y ago
  Has anybody made the same observation? : Philosophy seems to be concerned with furniture a lot. I'm compiling a list of examples I encountered where in a philosophical (sometimes not philosophical) context someone brings up the table (rarer so the chair) as an instance of a physical thing. I started compiling this list when I was convinced this is a thing. Further examples (book citations, links) greatly encouraged if you can contribute. My list is still small but only because I was so late to take action. I have an idea of why this is. But I want to corroborate my empiric base before going to the greater public with this.
  • coldtea 2y ago
    >I have an idea of why this is. Because they are convenient examples of things everybody in their audience has seen and knows about, and are quite simple too? One could use dogs for example, to make somebody understand the Platonic Ideas (in this case, dogness), but they have a lot more aspects and variables than tables (even questions about unique personality and soul might creep in, whereas for tables it wont).
    • nakedneuron 2y ago
      While this is true, there are billions of convenient examples everybody knows. Also there are things that have a lot less variables than a table. I'm not convinced. (I don't thing so.)
      • lovemenot 2y ago
        I will bite. How do these multi-thousand-year furniture lobbyists continue to conspire to successfully frame our contemporary ideas toward their agenda?
        • nakedneuron 2y ago
          Thanks for biting. But I'm also serious. Some evidence that I'm not joking, two more or less prominent examples... From Roger Penrose's "The road to reality", chapter 1.3 "Is Plato's mathematical world ‘real’?": "I am aware that there will still be many readers who find difficulty with assigning any kind of actual existence to mathematical structures. Let me make the request of such readers that they merely broaden their notion of what the term ‘existence’ can mean to them. The mathematical forms of Plato’s world clearly do not have the same kind of existence as do ordinary physical objects such as tables and chairs. They do not have spatial locations; nor do they exist in time." "Do Chairs Exist?" by Vsauce, ~11M views: https://youtu.be/fXW-QjBsruE https://youtu.be/fXW-QjBsruE "How" you ask.. I think we need to trace back when philosophers started to hit on that meme. I think the "multi-thousand-year furniture lobbyists" started to jump on the bandwagon from there and things co-evolved after that. I am determined to solve that humandkind-old mystery.
• meristohm 2y ago
  Title a play on Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower?[0] Other cultures don't use sofas, and I'm curious if they were originally a thing for royalty (like flat green lawns and white bread and so many other "luxuries" we royal Americans went in for), and I would vote for leaving ours (IKEA, so not the worst in terms of PFAS coating and other toxins, but also not great) with the house when/if we move, and sitting on the floor again, which my spouse and I did early on, influenced by our time in Japan (and our relative lack of money). I appreciate this article about valuing local repair shops. I did the same with a pair of boots, and will continue to pay for such service, not least because I like getting to know craftsmen. [0] https://worldcat.org/title/parable-of-the-sower/oclc/28255529 https://worldcat.org/title/parable-of-the-sower/oclc/2825552...
  • codexb 2y ago
    Wait, if other cultures don't use sofas, what do they sit on? Are their houses all full of single chairs?
    • salomonk_mur 2y ago
      In the floor or a mat.
      • ghaff 2y ago
        Or wood stools/benches/chairs. Fabric was very expensive until relatively recently. A modern sofa would presumably have been an extreme luxury item not that long ago in historical terms.
  • timbray 2y ago
    You're right, but I didn't realize that till later. Except for the original "Parable of the Sower" was from Jesus not Olivia. But I also thought of Olivia's first.
  • unscaled 2y ago
    I'm not sure if by other culture you mean Japan, but relatively Japanese definitely use sofa nowadays. Certainly, in the past they did not, but if you go back to the 19th centuries you could probably say the same about western countries (being "for the royalty" seems like a stretch, but they were certainly too expensive for commoners). Old, tatami-only houses generally won't have heavy legged furniture at all, but tatami-only houses are rarely being built. It used to be come to have a single tatami room in most homes, but that is also becoming more uncommon for new houses nowadays. In modern houses, you'd usually have sofa. I don't remember if I've ever seen a multi-room Japanese house without one, but one-room apartments can be really small, and if the owner doesn't host people often (or ever) they won't have a sofa. What is very common in Japan (especially in small apartments and one room apartments) is a low-sofa (basically a low profile sofa, often without a base or legs) and zaisu[1] - originally a fancier sitting pillow with back for tatami floors, but nowadays it's mostly low-profile sofa chair or more often just a sofa chair without legs. These things are more flexible and portable and allow you to sit closer to the floor. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaisu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaisu
• j45 2y ago
  Lifestyle business is often sent out as a slur, often originating from someone who has said lifestyle from being wealthy. Traditional VC investment by its definition is trying to hedge it's returns by investing in the time of startup founders, and often only large bets make the return worth while. Increasingly, I agree with the idea to call a business "self-funded", because that's what it actually is, instead of bootstrapped or lifestyle. I would say it might not be a stretch that what every founder is doing is to make an improvement in the lifestyle of their team and clients. VC investment is a good vehicle when entered into mindfully, and also drastically changes your course.
• _nalply 2y ago
  It's about incentives. One example: What if companies rented sofas instead of selling them? Perhaps a weird idea, but humour me. The incentives would shift. Companies would be more interested to give you durable sofas. Because there will be less profit if they have to replace sofas more often.
  • ghaff 2y ago
    There are furniture rental places. They rent pretty much the cheapest crap they can get their hands on.
• jacobn 2y ago
  A very big reason for the “go big or go home” mentality comes from very simple company valuation metrics: If you have $10M ARR and modest growth you’re probably going to get a ~4x P/E valuation. If you have $100M ARR and modest growth you can go public and get a ~20x P/E valuation. So you’re not only 10x more valuable, you’re 50x more valuable. Basically you get a massive multiplier boost on top of the increased scale. (Rough & approximate, YMMV, etc)
• losvedir 2y ago
  I guess I don't take it for granted like in the article that replacing something is necessarily bad. What specifically is the metric that is bad here? Landfill space? Material waste? Ikea furniture is less dense so sort of wins here. Cost to the consumer? His original sofa is $5,000 in today's dollars. Will it last longer than multiple consecutive Ikea sofas? Recall that because of the time value of money, an Ikea sofa today is maybe $1,000 but a replacement 5 years from now is likely only to be "worth" $700 in today's money, and then one 5 years from then will be $500, and so on? So for $5,000 today you could have a "lifetime supply" of Ikea couches. Maybe the problem is carbon released in the manufacturing? I'm not sure an artisan making trips to a lumber supply store and making a couch a day wins out vs. an Ikea factory producing hundreds an hour supplied by ships and trains and trucks. To the extent this raises a problem about capitalism, it's that increasingly price discovery doesn't work anymore. Competition has been the driver of efficiencies and progress for centuries, but it doesn't really work if every purchase you also have to go "but what about the carbon?" "what about the workers' conditions?" "what about the animal welfare?" "what about the landfills?". In other words, there are so many externalities conscientious consumers have to search the history of the company and rely on branding and marketing to make a decision. Many, like Mr Bray here, just throw their hands up and say the whole system is flawed. Cheap things should be the goal. If we had a carbon tax, appropriate labor laws combined with tariffs or trade agreements, costs for landfill space or whatever, then you just need to buy the cheapest thing and that will be the most efficient! I know I personally tried to live this philosophy 10 years ago when I purchased a $400 pair of handcrafted boots (trying to follow Vimes's philosophy), and I regret it. They've not held up well, though at least I was able to re-sole them at a cobbler here in town.
• itazula 2y ago
  That leather is from one cow??
• 20after4 2y ago
  The enshittification of Google Search and Social Network sites has made it much more difficult to find the local, high-quality option. It's hard to identify them among a sea of scams and low-quality China imports with a million different brand names. I will say that the China imports have drastically improved in quality while the alternatives have consistently deteriorated or disappeared.
• sandos 2y ago
  Our 20~ year old sofa was much cheaper than this (considering intial purchase+repair), but also not leather. Its not really showing any signs of age, after some fixing from cat damage. Does it contain cheap sawdust-formed-into-wood? Probably. Do I care? No. I would never pay 5 figures for a sofa. Our sofa was around 1000$, this talk about 3000$ for fixing cushions feels a bit off to me. Yes, yes I am part of the problem: I would rather buy a new sofa than fix a sofa for more money than a new one which is likely to hold up for the rest of my life would cost.
  • whiterace1488 2y ago
    [dead]
• EchoReflection 2y ago
  "Which is something that modern capitalism is trying to make impossible". Absurd. Modern capitalism? As compared to...classical capitalism, or ancient capitalism? Capitalism doesn't "try" to do anything, capitalism is a system by which goods and services are exchanged at market-determined values. Those values can be/are altered by things like taxes and government subsidies, of course, but saying capitalism "tries" to do [X] is like saying gravity "tries" to make objects fall down. "Basic Economics" and "Economic Facts and Fallacies" by Thomas Sowell are two books that do a pretty good job of clarifying how and why economies work (or fail to work) in the ways that they do. https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/basic-economics-a-common-sense-guide-to-the-economy-9780465002603 https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/basic-econom... https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/economic-facts-and-fallacies-second-edition-9780465022038 https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/economic-fac...
• krosaen 2y ago
  Sofas of the last 15 years suck if you think buying a stylish looking $1000-2000 sofa is going to last. Try $4000-5000 and you will get a really nice long lasting sofa. You can repair / restuff / reupholster it every 10 or 15 years. This is not new. Reading people complaining about cheap stylish furniture breaking down after a few years reminds me of people complaining that commercial flights used to have more legroom and hot meals - those same flights also cost a lot more (inflation adjusted).
• l0b0 2y ago
  I bought an IKEA 2-seat sofa + 3-seat sofa bed in 2005. I tightened the bed springs maybe five years ago, and cut a piece of plywood to put between the bed and cushions to heighten them and to avoid constantly wearing the springs. Aside from that, it's been moved four times, never had a rip, and still looks pretty new except for a little scuffing on the corners. The thing is rock solid, and some of the best money I ever spent.