Parable of the Sofa | Hacker News Reader

Parable of the Sofa

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547 pointszdw344 comments

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.

> 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)

> 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.

I think the point is that McDonald’s is literally all over the world, but that doesn’t mean the food is consistent.

McDonalds may have the most consistent food product in the world.

Eh. I have terrible taste, so I've eaten McDonalds around the US as well as in Paris and Bangalore.

Within the US, yeah, it's very consistent. I've not seen much variation, other than the one or two specially decorated locations and the menu is very consistent.

Internationally, the branding is very consistent, but the product isn't that consistent. The fries in Paris were very different (and not very good; my feeling is they probably used the same procedure but very different potatoes), but the burgers were pretty similar. In India, they don't serve burgers, but at least when I was there, they did have the delicious old school chicken nuggets that they replaced with 'all white-meat' bleh nuggets in the US. I didn't try any of their chicken sandwiches, because why when I could have the nuggets of my youth?

I understand there's significant regional differences in all the territories they operate in.

They purposely tailor items to the country they're in, and even add entirely new items. For example, the fries in Country X might be cooked with different ingredients or in a different manner, in an attempt to satisfy consumers in that demographic. You'd better believe they could serve US-style fries wherever they wanted, if they wanted. The reason they don't is not because they can't but because they don't want to.

It is remarkably consistent, tourists go to McD's very often when short on time because they know almost exactly what they’re getting, even though they might be a 10h flight from their home.

I was thinking the same thing.

So, how is that story going to help me? Apparently, I can't buy a sofa of this quality any more, and if I want it fixed, I apparently have to go to Canada.

I don't know, assuming you agree with the article's conclusions couldn't you just buy second hand and refurbish when possible?

The article mentions a canadian refurbisher, but I don't think it implies they don't exist elsewhere.

You can actually buy sofas of quality. The easiest way is to go to the local design center (most cities have one and if you’re not in a city you can drive to the closest and visit) and you’ll often find many retailers selling high quality furniture. It’s the stuff that’s kind of expensive but not so heavily styled as to incur a crazy premium just for looking expensive. You will be able to see it as it’ll look like Tim’s sofa but costs 2x or more what said sofa would cost on Wayfair. They’re often but not always made in the North Carolina region stateside, other locales seem to be Ohio and Pennsylvania.

We bought such a sofa per advice from a friend that’s an interior designer, and it’s amazing. At 10 years it looks like it was brand new and has withstood the first 10 years of baby life including playdates and kids drawing on it, etc (we got it with a special treatment to make it not absorb such things and it actually worked). Kids jumping off the back frame, throwing all the cushions around, etc. Literally unblemished and the internal frame is rock solid.

But also the single most expensive piece of furniture I’ll ever buy. I’ll never need to buy a replacement for it though. I expect to be using it for the rest of my life and passing it onto my descendants.

Read the Dwell article referenced in the article to learn that the whole ecosystem of the North Carolina furniture industry is dying out rapidly due to the onslaught of cheap, light, shippable, assemble-at-destination flatpack furniture.

We have a 20-year-old quality sofa from a major NC company that we got reupholstered by them last year, just before they went out of business.

Yeah. I expect only the best craftsman paired with the best businessmen will survive. But there’s a decent market among the affluent for quality furniture and most commercial furniture for high traffic environments demand pretty high end and durable stuff.

The point of the article is that the big business model is "continued growth", which depends on constantly increasing sales, which means products necessarily get shittier so that they must be replaced more frequently. Small "lifestyle" businesses do not operate under this principle and encourage reuse and renewal. They represent opposing philosophies.

Whether you can "just" get a sofa from big business or not, that is precisely what they hope for, and ideally you should be purchasing a sofa more frequently than you already do to further support this notion.

'The point of the article is that the big business model is "continued growth", which depends on constantly increasing sales, which means products necessarily get shittier so that they must be replaced more frequently.' - Sorry to interject here, but this is extremely wrong and nowhere did I find this take-away from the posted article. There are massive businesses that do sell extremely high-quality products - in fact, Japan went through a transition where their businesses went from producing absolute junk (i.e. just like the stuff we import from China today) to producing extremely high quality products (see Juran, Crosby, and cost of quality measures etc...). The key point of the article is that consumers today choose low-priced products since the market gives it to them. If you allow a person to buy a $800 sofa which looks great on the outside and is made in China albeit with extremely low quality materials vs. a sofa which looks almost exactly the same but is priced at $1500 but is of much higher quality - most consumers will obviously choose the $800 dollar sofa vs the $1500 since that's how the free-market functions. Is this rational though?

Well - the consumer will need to buy 4 of the $800 dollar sofas just from having to replace them throughout a 20 year period vs. having the ability to buy one (the $1500) one but that's not obvious to the consumer and it's not clear how to even make this type of judgment. Which sofa really costs the most to you given the information I just provided? The high-quality $1500 one or the $800 dollar one? To a rational person having all of the above information - the more costly one is cheaper - but to an average consumer not having this information the clearly cheaply made product is the better choice. People also are prone to more short-term thinking in many societies which also doesn't help things but the takeaway in general which you posted there is very wrong: mass production and scale usually result in higher-quality products not lower quality ones.

The problem is that sofas haven’t come down significantly in price. These shittier products aren’t actually much cheaper than, for example, a custom made sofa. I know this because I just bought a custom made sofa.

But the quality is incomparable.

Yes but this is once again where the free-markets and economics come in: if the mass-produced ones match the custom-made ones in price, consumers will start switching to custom-made sofas. The mass-production suppliers will either have to 1) lower the price of their sofas or 2) increase the quality of production to match the quality of the custom-made ones. Both 1 and 2 are great for consumers and this is why competition is so great :). Notice that all of this is driven by the choices the CONSUMER (me and you) make.

This is a very theoretical argument but I don't think it happens that way in reality, because of all the ways that real human beings are not economically perfect agents. Particularly the information asymmetries - it's much harder to gauge the reputation of a small business vs. a big one.

That’s not quite true, because many people don’t have good custom sofa makers near them. Moreover, because they are small businesses, they don’t have the same capacity for marketing as big brands; most of their business is word of mouth.

Also, custom sofas take time to build - not much, but 2-4 weeks or so.

So there are a lot of reasons big brands are convenient. But you pay for that convenience in quality.

Not sure about sofas but when I bought a bed and some bookcases and nightstands last year all from national retailers, the lead time was 4-12 weeks depending on the product. Getting a custom sofa in 2-4 weeks would beat the competition in many cases. Again, the market constraint lies in knowing about the small vendor in the first place and having a way to purchase it conveniently.

The problem isn't just short-term thinking. You alluded to another point yourself:

> Looks great on the outside

Consumers aren't often equipped to evaluate quality, partly due to skill issues, partly because the corners are cut in places which are hard to spot before purchase. Price doesn't work as a discriminating factor (except to filter out a portion of the worst inventory) because of the number of brands explicitly trying to pass off junk as high-quality luxuries.

If you really can't tell which one is better, and you're as likely to get scammed buying something expensive, why not put less money on the line for something that has a chance of being good enough?

This is a key factor: businesses have learned to “optimize” by cutting corners wherever people can’t perceive the deficit. The product just has to last long enough.

In the off-chance this is a good place to ask, how does a consumer (or, ideally, the existing governing body) fight back? I'll briefly walk through a hypothetical scenario to have something concrete to talk about, then ask about the normal alternatives?

Say you have an IoT device. It's marketed as a device capable of doing a task (e.g., scanning car OBD codes). That task can be done offline. The device initially does that task offline. The app had a backdoor, and the owning company used that backdoor to force logins on previously happy users. Later, they restrict functionality-which-could-be-completely-offline-and-used-to-work to people who pay for a monthly subscription, or maybe they go out of business or otherwise just decide to shut down the servers (see the recent Spotify debacle).

With that backdrop:

- The ToS usually ban class actions and require arbitration.

- The fraud in question is on the order of $20-$200 -- not worth being pursued for most people.

- The ToS are somehow magically invoked when you buy the product, regardless of whether you even saw a warning message suggesting that there might exist a legal agreement which you should read.

The usual outcomes are (1) you get a default judgement and are unable to exercise it because the company goes bankrupt or does some sort of shenanigan which requires a lawyer costing more than the damage in question (a common solution is spinning off a subsidiary owning all the bad debt and responsibilities, keeping the assets elsewhere, kind of like what Johnson and Johnson tried after the talc/cancer debacle), (2) despite the company's best efforts you get a class-action judgement, and the company settles for much less harm than they inflicted, happily pocketing the difference, (3) other more complicated and/or less desirable situations.

What does an individual do to limit their liability in a world where that sort of fraud seems to be condoned, and what options do we have as a society to reduce the overall problem?

Hero pill dispenser is currently pulling this play. They're pairing a monthly service fee with a device that doesn't need one.

It seems hopeless to me. Clearly the company restructuring to separate assets from liabilities should be criminalized and corporate directors / executives should be subjected to criminal prosecutions but that very rarely happens.

The entire concept of corporations as a shield from liability is actually really dubious in my opinion.

> Consumers aren't often equipped to evaluate quality, partly due to skill issues

Maybe, maybe not. But regardless, in parallel to this, we have corporations whose modus operandi is at worst to lie to consumers about quality, and at best to mislead. And not just about specific products, but about quality as a general concept.

I'm pretty sure we're in total agreement.

E.g., with the right training you can tell the difference between the sort of particle board flooring that will balloon up and be destroyed when a drop of water lands on it, the sort of particle board flooring that resists minor water infiltration, and various grades of "real" floors, but most people don't have that training.

Separately (and I _think_ my messaging was clear about this -- talking about the corners being cut being ones that are hard to discover and describing the companies doing that shit as scammers), yes I totally agree; corporations are absolutely not passive participants in consumers being unable to make educated decisions. Even major brands will actively defraud consumers (e.g., Garmin revoking a bunch of lifetime licenses on Navionics software and trying to whitewash public opinion by claiming it was for the customers' own good, or Atlassian blatantly ignoring the CCPA because it's a fairly toothless law), and there exists a plethora of maybe-legal-but-obviously-wrong behavior from most successful companies, including but not limited to "lies, or at best misleadings."

> If you allow a person to buy a $800 sofa which looks great on the outside and is made in China albeit with extremely low quality materials vs. a sofa which looks almost exactly the same but is priced at $1500 but is of much higher quality - most consumers will obviously choose the $800 dollar sofa vs the $1500 since that's how the free-market functions. Is this rational though?

This is rarely the choice though. In my experience, the choices tend to be the $800 low quality sofa, the $3000 low quality but with a name brand sofa, and the $6000 low quality but with an even fancier name brand sofa.

Presumably there are some manufacturers that still produce furniture that's actually made of massive wood rather than cardboard and veneer, but it's becoming increasingly rare.

I bought a sofa from a local builder a few years ago for around $2500. The frame is well built but the cushions lost their original shape within 6 months. All told, I'd rather have the sturdy sofa that looks a bit sloppy over a sofa that will break if more than three friends sit on it but I'd really rather have a sturdy one that still looks great after five years.

Maybe next time.

you can buy high foam density replacement cushions for relatively cheap online if you want to replace them

A high-quality leather sofa these days is closer to $15K than $1500, ouch.

There are loads of manufacturers that still do this. Go to any furniture row, you’ll see the Ikea parking lot is full, the rc willey parking lot less so, and the premier quality furniture brands parking lots nearly empty.

I don't disagree with you - but this also explains the determining factor in which product wins and why today's markets or sofas are lower quality than they were 30+ years ago. If price doesn't matter - what's going to be the driving force in buying behavior? Consumer behavior in other words is no longer driven by quality or long-term cost: today, people will simply choose the lowest cost items and deal with the pain of having to replace it every X years. This drives the market to place a premium on what then? LOWEST COST. Lowest cost = the manufacturers that cut corners and reduce quality, so the market driving force (consumers) lead to a game where the lowest cost producers win and thus saturate the marketplace with junk.

> Well - the consumer will need to buy 4 of the $800 dollar sofas just from having to replace them throughout a 20 year period vs. having the ability to buy one (the $1500) one

Even an $800 sofa will probably last much longer than five years. An added benefit to disposable items is that when you move and/or your tastes change, it's easier to abandon the old sofa and buy a new one than to take the old one with you. (With a little luck and perseverance you may even be able to recoup a few bucks by selling the old one.)

This is boots theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

> ... 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.

What's better: having to do a few minutes of research to find a good sofa repair shop in your city or having to buy a new sofa every 5 years?

Further: what's better for you personally, and what's better for the planet? Are they compatible?

> But, surprise, this second option doesn't scale.

Why is it important for every type of business to scale? Is "scale" a virtue we must judge every business by?

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/07/19/stupidity-scales/

> We can’t use common sense because it doesn’t fit on a form.

> We can’t use a simple approach to solve the problem in front of us unless the same approach would also work on a problem 100x larger that we may never have.

> If the smart thing to do doesn’t scale, maybe we shouldn’t scale.

When the sofa refurbisher can only handle 100 sofas a year, the 101st customer doesn't have any where to go. Perhaps the market will then lead a second refurbisher to set up shop but that only moves the constraint somewhere else in the supply chain. By its very nature, these small shops can never serve "everyone" the way the big box retailers and flat pack builders can. It's not really a solution to the problem at hand.

Aren't those "constrants" and having people set up shop to solve them literally the most important and critical basic block of our western economies and are critical for social wellbeing? Why do you keep trying to paint this as a negative in response to essentially command economy the monopolies create?

> Every time I read takes like this I think people forget why big brands exist?

I think the article made a great point why big brands exist -- to deliver on the promise of unbridled growth, often leading to enshittification.

> But big brands could offer customer service just fine if people wanted it.

The experience suggests that they usually offload that to a third-party vendor to cut costs and we all know that does not track as good as small, family owned, locally sourced, your trustworthy shop.

> But, surprise, this second option doesn't scale.

True. Probably does not have to. A sufficiently wide distribution of such businesses is just as good.

> Yes fixing stuff is good for the planet. But big brands could offer customer service just fine if people wanted it.

They could but they won't. Because they realized (and probably all agreed) that it's far more profitable to sell the customer a new product, rather than fixing the old one. And since they are the big brands, and they have practically a monopoly (think about big tech companies) they make the rules. They even have the power to sue the crap to which small business tries to fix their products, like Apple did multiple times.

The repair culture is not something sustainable for a big business, that to stay in the market has to increase year after year their sales, and the only way to do so is... making consumers buy new products, even if they don't need them. How to do so? Decrease the quality of the products, make them impossible to repair. No big business would stay alive if they sold you a couch that lasts a century.

I must have hallucinated that I went to an auto dealer for warranty service last week.

Enterprise software companies have consulting and support services.

At the consumer level though, most people aren't willing to pay for the cost of the manufacturer or retailer repairing clothing and other relatively low cost items. As in this article, there are local businesses that do such things but it can be really hard to justify for lower cost items. I have had shoes resoled and otherwise repaired but haven't done it in years and probably most recently a pair of very expensive custom hiking boots that were made to be repairable. (And the repair was probably $200 or so.)

While i do take your point, i think a big problem with discussions about "big businesses" is that they are completely different most of the time. A sofa =/= a car =/= enterprise software. But then how do discussions happen? A sofa is just a thing to sit on at home, you undoubtedly have other things to sit on. Needing to repair a sofa is not catastrophic to survival. Needing to repair a family car can be catastrophic to an individual or family. Needing to repair enterprise software can be catastrophic to a large business itself. There's hugely different consequence scales here, which i guess correlates with how willing a "large" company is to provide the desired support

I think there's some argument that at scale, the mass decision to replace rather than repair furniture is catastrophic.

At the consumer level it frequently doesn't make sense to repair an item. My son had a part fail on his luggage last winter. It might be covered under warranty (the manufacturer wouldn't commit until inspecting the product) but the repair would require shipping the suitcase to them and paying for return shipping. It was going to cost about $150 minimum to have it repaired on a piece that is already a decade old and could be replaced for $200 on sale. I have seen this repeated many times across products.

I've had minor clothing repairs/alterations done at a local dry cleaner for a fairly nominal sum. (Maybe $10-15) But if you can't just easily do something yourself, yeah, you tend to be looking at a floor of at least $100 and at least a certain amount of hassle.

Things I might have taken in to be repaired 25 years ago like a laser printer just don't make sense to do so today.

You don't even have to go the conspiratorial route to realize that repair doesn't make sense to big businesses. The cost of diagnosing the problem, performing the repair, and validating the repair is fairly high. It is also difficult to ensure consistency in the quality of repairs. Then you have to consider that they think about things on a large scale, while repair is an individualized thing. Just look at how computers are repaired. The actual defective component may cost pennies, yet an entire module is replaced. It's not necessarily because the module is impossible to repair. It's because repair processes are difficult to standardize, the cost of replacing the module may be lower than repairing it, and consistent outcomes are difficult to ensure.

Then there is dealing with the customer. A lot of people like to know how much a repair will cost. You can offer an accurate quote when replacing an entire module. A lot of people cannot understand bills that are $0.05 parts + $100.00 labour, so they feel ripped off. A lot of people cannot understand why a repaired product would exhibit problems when it is returned to them (e.g. there was an independent undiagnosed problem).

I think it depends on the business. Maybe fixing 20 year old electronics might be hard, but it still work for (overengineered? underchanged?) herman miller aeron chairs.

Though even Aeron chairs, I had one fixed under warranty after 12 or so years. Then it pretty much fell apart after another 12 or so years. It might have been fixable again but it didn't seem worthwhile to faff around especially mid-COVID and I'm glad I just got a new one which was rock solid. (At the time I wished I could try a couple other models but I ended up being very happy just getting a direct replacement.)

> I ended up being very happy just getting a direct replacement

I so wish this worked for shoes/clothing/etc

You get really comfortable wearing it, then... you have to do a bunch of research next time.

My backpack wore through the back of my 2 year old Patagonia down jacket. They have a repair program, and fixed the jacket for free, didn't even pay shipping. So some large companies actually do this.

I wonder if they're a specific outlier. Remember they didn't want to sell their jackets to wall street folks.

>Decrease the quality of the products, make them impossible to repair.

Do not know why but it makes me sad and wanting to live in another century

In previous centuries you'd find out sofas are so expensive they're out of your reach, might settle for rustic chairs. Cheap and all, what you have in your house would belong in a palace instead of a peasant home. Farther back, your home would have more riches and tools than entire tribes.

Enjoy the present, and shop wisely.

A key problem is that when people make purchasing decisions, price ranks extremely high on the priority list, even when it will be costlier and worse for the consumer in the long run. Capitalism has found a thousand ways to exploit that inherent trait we all share, and we have to work damn hard to counteract it—-and most people won’t even know they should be making that effort.

A lifestyle business isn’t elitist, nor necessarily for elitist customers. It is in most people’s interest to invest in quality, but not everyone can afford it and even among those that do, the final price tag has an undue weight in the equation. (Not to mention that big brands are removing quality as an option even in the higher price ranges)

>when i need a sofa, i want to be able to “just” get a sofa

Which is understandable, and also the whole problem. Everything that used to go along with getting that sofa, like the human interaction, is thrown out in the name of efficiency, and eventually we all end up locked in our houses with nowhere to go but our jobs.

It's not just efficiency, the very last thing I want to do when buying any good or service is talk to another human being. Hell if self checkout is any indication people will trade efficiency for not having to talk to a person.

Eventually we'll all end up conserving our social battery for friends and loved ones rather than work and shopping.

Where do the friends and loved ones come from?

Not from grocery store interactions that's for damn sure.

My friend family tree is messy as hell but I can loosely bucket them in people I met in high school or college, people I met at parties, people I met at raves, people I met at shared interest gatherings — skate park, community garden, clubs, people I met at rallies/protests, people I met online, and then all of their friends and partners, and their friends of friends, etc..

I get that it's unbelievably hard to bootstrap from literally zero but like, the cashier at the gas station really doesn't feel like it's the play unless you live in a tiiiiny ass town.

> 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.

I don't really agree with this. Unlike big corporations that stick around despite bad service, small businesses have a reputation to maintain. The only bad small businesses that can remain long enough are ones in high density, high turn-over areas (ie: high tourism, fast changing populations like NYC). For sleepier places, these businesses rely on word of mouth and repeat customers.

The reason why people buy a sofa from a generic corp rather than this kind of shop is price.

> 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)

I've always wondered -- who cares if you hit a scaling limit? Why can't you just coast on huge demand, refuse some customers, and have a sustainable business that's founded on trust in the quality of your product?

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/2825552...

Wait, if other cultures don't use sofas, what do they sit on? Are their houses all full of single chairs?

In the floor or a mat.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I thought the "lifestyle business" negativity was chiefly around trendy businesses that are only viable due to being covertly subsidized, eg. by family money.

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).

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.

Same here, but maybe I was thinking of “lifestyle brand” and I’d never actually heard “lifestyle business”.

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.

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.

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).

> 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.

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.

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.

Hooray to sound joins, I guess.

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.

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...

The Ikea sofa makes a lot of sense if you don't think you'll stay in the same place for very long.

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.

I don't understand where the idea comes from that IKEA sofas fall apart after 5 years. All of their sofas come with a 10 year warranty, even the cheapest ones. Here's one at the $850 price point: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/uppland-sofa-blekinge-white-s19...

Their more expensive ones come with a 25 year warranty and still only cost $2,500: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/stockholm-sofa-seglora-natural-...

It is a very "limited" warranty:

https://www.ikea.com/us/en/files/pdf/40/04/4004a9de/seating_...

If the sofa breaks, then sure it's covered.

But it explicitly doesn't cover fabric or leather coverings -- and good luck trying to convince them that the foam padding has gone all flat.

Whereas in my experience, how long a sofa lasts is determined precisely by how long the coverings and cushions last. (I've never in my life seen a sofa break.)

So the IKEA warranty is irrelevant there.

Your UPPLAND sofa may work great for 30 years in a guest room where it's sat on 5 times a year.

But good luck getting it to last 10 years in the living room where the whole family is using it every day and kids are climbing all over it. (Of course, more expensive IKEA sofas do tend to last longer than the cheapest ones -- people are usually talking about the cheap ones.)

No sofa has a 25 year warranty on fabric, that wouldn't make sense - but you can of course by insurance for it and usually most non-IKEA sofa shops will offer you Scotchguard cover usually for 3 to 5 years.

Depending on the Sofa you can or course get one that has IKEA+ which is replaceable covers, which you can't do with most other sofas.

(Disclosure: I work at IKEA, although I only found out the 25 year cover a few weeks ago)

The stuff that isn't covered is the stuff that will naturally wear out with use and can be easily replaced, so I don't see the problem.

The point is cheap stuff wears out a lot more quickly, and it's not easy or cheap to replace fabric and padding, and may not even be financially worth it.

The point is that having a 10 year warranty doesn't mean your cheap sofa is going to last as long as an expensive one. It's not a signal at all that IKEA sofas are high quality.

Except he said:

> new leather sofas of the “not flat-packed sawdust and glue” variety quickly get into five figures

five figures >= $10,000, not $5,000

I've had my IKEA sofa for close to a decade, saying you need to change it every 5 years is not even close to true. There's a perception that more expensive=will last longer, but it just doesn't hold out in reality. Oftentimes the mass market product really is just a solid product.

Not sofas but office chairs, currently sitting on an IKEA Markus chair that my parents bought for me when I was in the 7th grade. I'm 30.

I don't know why HN has the idea that IKEA is cheap trash - yes some of the things in their catalog are not very high quality, but they seem to be very consistent.

But more importantly (for me), because they have such a huge catalog, and a propensity to optimise, they ended up with a supremely hackable furniture - everything fits together with everything else, whenever you want to build something - there are tons of parts available - and you can buy just the parts its kinda like lego.

Also a lot of Ikea stuff is made of honeycomb paper - so it's trivial to put cables and electronics inside. I've hacked multiple tables and sofas by putting charging ports / wireless chargers and other doo-dads inside, vastly decreasing my cable management issues.

And again if anything breaks, its kinda trivial to fix it yourself, as you've probably assembled it and know where each bold and nail go.

The aspect of Ikea furniture I like - it is typically stylish. To get an equivalent look somewhere else usually invokes large price increases for seemingly no change in quality.

It is definitely not the best quality, but I have moved several Ikea pieces over the years without much ill effects. Would I like to upgrade to some "adult" furniture one day? Maybe, but I fear much of it is like other designer goods - identical crap construction with a reputable label stitched on the front.

Ikea stuff with metal parts: grab it and keep it.

Ikea stuff with solid wood parts: if you really like it, it's probably good value.

Ikea stuff with manufactured wood parts: you'd better really like, because it probably won't last that long or that well.

One nice thing about IKEA furniture is that the price of an item is well connected to its quality, and they offer items in a range of quality levels, so there’s a trustable signal in the price

I don't know if this is specific to where you are, but my experience in IKEAs in NL doesn't fully support that. Some really decent metal products (mini tables/trolleys) can cost $20-40 (what I'd consider more budget friendly), while a $50ish bookshelf uses particleboard. The cheapest deskmat has poor quality but is cheap, but the $20 or $30 top end "fancy" one is still some kind of plastic.

My learning has been - find the good deals where they are (there are some really good ones!), but check the quality of everything first.

I guess I’m thinking intra-product category here. A sofa that costs 2x the price of another, I’m expecting to be 2x the quality

I think you would want to be prepared to be disappointed, hah.

Honestly, IKEA have made so many cuts in quality since 2021, and increased prices, it's barely recognisable.

https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/viskafors-3-seat-sofa-lejde-ant... here's a £1100 sofa (2x the famous Ektorp). Sure, it's got a bit of solid wood, some slightly higher density foam in some areas, some cheap springs, but that's about it. It's got very poor quality fabric according to the reviews - a trend in their sofas the last couple of years.

I would bet if you picked up the corner of /any/ IKEA sofa (I've tested maybe 6-8), there would be significant flex. Ditto if you rocked the back.

There really is very little variance in quality in reality

It is mostly cheap trash, especially these days. You admit it yourself - honeycomb, particleboard etc. Saying "some" things are not high quality is being very very charitable

There used to be a better mix of cheap, mid and slightly upper mid. And they often pulling crap like swapping out for cheaper materials but calling it the same model name

> 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.

My IKEA sofa is 10 years old, has been through 4 moves, and looks and feels exactly the same as the day I bought it modulo a smattering of aftermarket pet hair. I see no reason why it wouldn't last another 10 years. The price right now today is $750. I'm sure I didn't pay more than $500 at the time. And it folds out to a large guest bed. And it has a storage compartment. And getting it up or down a flight of stairs is a breeze. It's just a substantially better bargain. And if I ever need to replace the foam in the cushions, I can buy blocks of foam to put inside the covers for very cheap.

Do you have kids or pets?

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?

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

What I meant by pace of fraud: think of US military R&D around World War II and the Cold War, vs. now., and whether they translate into anything actually useful for the soldiers in the field. What I think is a big part of the difference is that back then, US was fighting with peer powers and it was possible for it to lose. Over time, it transitioned to only fighting wars with much weaker opponents - wars with no "lose" condition, where the only variable is how much money the US is going to spend on any particular conflict before getting bored and recalling soldiers home. The latter kind of conflict doesn't create much of pressure to deliver working solutions, or even test bed to verify them.

I know little of U.S. foreign policy, but here's my unoriginal take. Those conflicts the U.S. engage in are the test beds for its military industry. Wheels need to spin and shrinking the industry is not an option. What's at stake is deterrence, thus yes survival, and I think it works quite well for them. In regards to "fraud".. you mean corruption.. or defunct machinery?.. in the former case I'd say it's a bonus for standing by.

Thanks for standing by.. :)

Some animals pretend to be more dangerous than they are by mimicking colors etc.

I asked ChatGPT and it came up with these cases of deception strategies in nature (I wasn't excluding mankind, it thinks man, and probably itself doesn't belong there):

Mimicry/false signaling/bluffing (look more dangerous, look inpalatable, distract attention, attract prey), camouflage (avoid being preyed), brood paratism (cokoos get parenting for free).

None of them involve deceiving partners into pretending higher level of fitness.

Thinking about this it becomes a little clearer why this is.

When you're buying a sofa the seller usually doesn't buy a sofa made by you. So there is an assymmetry. The sofa dealer not only monopolizes most information about the deal (factual quality, costs; competitors are shared information). Also, the dealer can influence what you think. Economies of scale at play both in advertising and production.

Secondly, only if those two sofas you exchanged were to be used to produce the next generation of sofas and only if those newly merged sofa designs would be the sole base of contemporary sofa design would this comparison hold.

Then it becomes clear that if both parties engage in deceiving each other the species as the hypthetical owner of all evolving sofa designs must lose.

If you don't mind another Wikipedia page, there's the (biology) theory of honest and dishonest signals in general:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory

I don't mind at all. Thanks for sharing, it looks like a very interesting read!

r/K selection is about the tradeoff between quantity and quality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory

Quality of care is distinct from fitness (gene quality if you will). It seems like offspring without much care is more needy of fitness than K-strategists.

Uh, sort of? Genetic variants are like gambles or conjectures. You can spew a lot of them out, let most of them die, and adapt quickly - that's the low-quality (and modern-sounding) r-strategy. It's not that the variants necessarily lack quality (here meaning fitness), it's just that you aren't banking on it, you aren't investing in them individually.

I don't see the connection to intentionally banking on lower quality across the board here.

Well yeah, there's no potential to cheat the environment by pretending to be fit (as somebody already commented), except mimicry is a way to do that (as also already mentioned). But you can be successfully unconcerned about quality, hoping for returns on rare successes, like with the Chinese Santa snowglobes mentioned elsewhere in the comments.

Could you point to the example you mentioned, I couldn't find it.

Seems to have vanished somehow. In short: person visits Greece, finds nasty Xmas baubles on sale among tourist items, mind boggles that people buy these and furthermore that there are enough sales to justify bringing them to Greece from China, postulates some logic like a 1000% profit per sale making it worthwhile even if only 20% ever sell.

Thanks for pointing out, I see now what you meant. Also thanks for sharing the Wiki article.. it was a difficult read with, I think, sometimes overly simplified examples that to this day seem to be mere hypotheses. But it also provided some valuable insights.. It's one of those rare reads where afterwards you see it everywhere.

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.

IKEA warranty most of its sofa 10 years now. But I doubt any other large furniture store will do the same.

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".

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".

> 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?

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.

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.

Lately I’ve been a bit depressed by startups I respect going down, most of all post.news which was a refined product developed in one and a half years by a moderate-sized team and funded by Scott Galloway and Andreessen Horowitz. The official statement was that it was not growing fast enough to make it as a consumer product:

https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/19/post-news-the-a16z-funded-...

Though I think there could be more to it than that: (1) the full development of that site would have required cooperation from the news industry that isn’t easy to get and (2) I don’t think they got the word out well because despite star-studded founders and investors and my being interested in that sort of thing (to the extent of doing market research and product analysis for that kind of thing) I never heard about it until the last week…. And that’s for a business much more interesting and innovative that the comparable Threads or Bluesky.

From the outside though it seems like 1.5 years is not a lot of time to exhaust the possibilities of growth for a site like that. (As I see it Reddit took more like 3 years for subreddits to become what we know)

On the other hand there are the zombie unicorns.

I have been watching Temu: I saw the ads, I bought what could be most of my halloween costume this year and two rolls of fox stickers (not sure if that was a mistake or a dark pattern) and a dragon figurine. Almost everything was smaller than I expected and afterwards I got a huge volume of irrelevant but seemingly personalized emails. I think they’re a paper tiger: I can be impressed by their advertising spend but they don’t seem like masters of marketing and algorithms to me.

The of course there is Uber and the other ride hailing and food delivery services. Uber has spent over $25 billion on giving subsidized taxi rides and there is no end in sight. Even at American prices, $25 billion could have built a lot of subway or light rail but Uber won’t leave such a legacy. Or if it does it will be breaking the economics of both chain and independent restaurants who have reshaped their businesses around a delivery business for which the economics doesn’t really work.

The strength of VC is it can make it bets like Temu and Uber but that can be very much a finger trap.

It occurs to me that one reason we have such a winner-take-all tech economy might be that VCs don't want anything else to exist.

I think of the $15 billion sale of WhatsApp to Facebook.

On one hand that seems like a great outcome to founders and VCs, but from the viewpoint of Facebook it is like extortion. I suspect Facebook uses every kind of influence it has to suppress the next WhatsApp because they don’t want to be doing that every two years or so, particularly when prices for things like that go up over time and not down.

Ha -- I would be a good candidate customer for post.news, and you've known about it (checks the post above) a week longer than I have :-)

See https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

The goal is to make a return on investment. A successful lifestyle business doesn't generally make money for investors, or at least they expect to make more money from moonshot massive growth companies. So VCs will absolutely kill a potential or existing small, sustainable company for a chance at a billion-dollar company, even if the odds are tiny. For the founders, a lifestyle business is generally a better option, a) because it's their effort on the line, and b) because they don't get to make as many bets as the VCs do.

Also VCs and PE do not care long-term beyond the time when they cash out. If you’re building the business, you probably will care longer, especially about what happens to the people you hired and worked with.

It's OK, when many folks say "venture capitalists" they always utter it in a voice dripping with contempt as well (I certainly do).

"Lifestyle business" is what EVERYONE did back in the day before mega corporations. I come from a long line of shoemakers, tailors, and various artisans. All "lifestyle businesses". I expressed interest in following in their footsteps but my parents had sent me to college and always laughed at the idea of me taking up the family business. They had always felt it was too much of a hard life and as is typical for immigrants "wanted better for me". Ironically, artisanal work is now highly valued and I probably would be making far more money now (and have unbreakable job security) if I had somehow convinced my parents to apprentice me.

I suppose the closest thing to a lifestyle business in tech would be freelance consultants. It's more of a thing for certain people who typically have already spent a career in mega corps or VC-driven start-ups. I can't think of many people who have STARTED as freelancers-- other than some small number of academics.

I think lifestyle businesses are great, but if you are building a lifestyle business and meeting with VC firms then you are wasting their time. They can’t invest in you. Their business model is designed to take a large number of risky bets to try to catch a unicorn. If you have a less risky business that isn’t going to take off like a rocket, it might be a great idea and a massive success for you, but it isn’t compatible with their business model at all. You are better off meeting with angel investors who do invest in lifestyle businesses.

That said - VCs / PE are effectively in the business of outcompeting Lifestyle businesses.

Outcompeting? Hell no. Eliminating - sure.

It's the same thing when the outcome is that they "win".

It's not.

Lifestyle business has benefits B1, B2, B3, and cons C1, C2, C3.

VC/PE talks a lot about C1, C2, C3 and promotes its business that also has benefits B1 and B2.

Amidst the deceitful noise, people forget about B3 and migrate to the VC/PE backed thing.

Lifestyle business folds.

Society/people lose B3.

This is not out competing. It's just bullshit.

Yeah, and lifestyle businesses are not the ones YC will ever fund. Perhaps the contempt should be reserved, if people deem it's needed, for those venture vultures who feel they know the price of everything, but in actuality know the value of nothing.

I'm reminded of what happened to Instant Brands. They made a series of popular electric pressure cookers, but instead of remaining a successful medium-sized business, they took on a lot of debt in an attempt to expand, then went bankrupt when interest rates increased. Previous HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36310733

It's disappointing to see, because the products were genuinely good.

I think some of it is that it can be a lifestyle business from the perspective of the owners. For employees it can mean they're getting paid below the market rates at a large company and working at least as hard. That may be a reasonable tradeoff to avoid dealing with big company BS--though possibly dealing with small company BS instead.

That may all be a reasonable tradeoff but lifestyle business does get used as a rationale for a lot of things not all of which necessarily benefit employees. (Or maybe lifestyle business just gets used for a lot of things that are only somewhat related.)

Damn. I wouldn't expect that pressure give your rep. Is this from people in the industry, or people outside that don't get it?

In all honestly, to me you are one of the few people that come to my mind when I think of someone working on a project that's tangible and with "real impact". Precursor is so out of the box and cyberpunk and outside the confines of what institutions are working on

Hope in the future you get the support and validation that you should be getting

I wasn’t familiar but I assume this is what you’re referring to?

https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor

Yah, that's it.

I get it from all walks of life -- industry peeps, colleagues, academics, concerned friends and family.

I didn't always have a rep -- the first step is the hardest in any journey, and the criticism was just as strong (if not stronger) back then. But, I was also a hardware guy in a software world. I'm stubborn, idealistic, and a rule-breaker, so I didn't fit in to any traditional corporate roles; no boss could manage me. That made it easier to walk out the door.

The most bold critics were always VCs -- not ones that I met with because I needed investment or anything, just folks I would run into at conferences or do an odd job for as a mercenary. You'd wrap up the job, and they'd make some quip about how it's a shame I'm wasting my talent in a "lifestyle business" and how I should consider finding some honest work at one of their companies. It was like some sort of weird negging tactic. I eventually learned to shrug it off but really, thought I was the only one who heard that term applied so pejoratively.

Thankfully, I had a few lucky breaks, and I'm very happy about where I'm at. However, it helps that I found residence in a place with affordable public health care, a functional pension system, oodles of public housing, and low taxes. No way could I do what I'm doing and also be so chill about my future without a functioning social safety net. Unfortunately, "just move somewhere that suits your needs" is not scalable advice; I wish I had a more practical blueprint for others who want to do a lifestyle business, but I don't.

I don't understand why people constantly find contempt and condescension in things that are not good fits.

I think emotionally non loaded interactions are possible here.

VCs are in the business of risky business. Their objective is to fund businesses that will grow very large or collapse very fast and where there is lots of uncertainty as to which and where money increases the likelihood of the former outcome. That's the thing they do. The mechanism that they typically use is a note that converts to equity when a certain raise condition is met either by the private or public market.

Someone who goes to them and offers equity in a profitable business that has no intention to attempt to rocketship or IPO is making a mistake. What exactly do you expect them to do here? Give you money in exchange for incredibly illiquid private stock that doesn't pay out? That sounds like a dumb deal. Only a moron would give you money on terms like that.

But that doesn't mean you can't get money. Small business financing is available from banks and the government. And you can do the typical thing of starting successful businesses and selling them off and climbing the ladder. Every day small businesses are sold for values from $1k to tens of millions. They're not valued the same as venture-backed startups because they don't have the same cone of possibility as them.

If you're going to a VC to fund a Ford dealership in Golden, CO you have to be an imbecile. Not because starting Ford dealerships is dumb, but because you're going to a basketball coach and asking him to teach you tennis.

Entrepreneurial people are rare. So when you go to this coach, and he sees you're athletic, he's more likely to say "Why not basketball?" and give you a hundred reasons you should play basketball. That doesn't mean tennis is a dumb sport. Or even that you wouldn't have a better chance with tennis. It means you went to a basketball coach and he wants you to play basketball because your success is also his.

For someone with this guy's reputation, he could easily run the business himself. And it's the same for geohot. He doesn't need venture funding to sell $1 million worth of AI at home devices. It's not contempt from the VC. He's found an athlete, and he knows how to coach basketball. So he wants the athlete to play basketball.

>I think emotionally non loaded interactions are possible here.

And proceeds to use emotionally loaded words like "moron" and "imbecile". No, the contempt comes from thinking that their way of living is intellectually(/morally) superior, hence, not a lifestyle. For perception of contempt, that's from not wanting their way of living to be seen as intellectually(/morally) deficient.

The very best VCs should be able to keep the contempt hidden, perhaps with profit rationalizations, like you, or moral rationalizations, like a dang, but I understand the curiosity to see if, when we put geohot+bunnie against 2 very equanimous VCs, which team will win the social media battle ;). Especially if we give your fave team a 1-dang handicap

Okay, well I think there's a difference between "They think I'm an idiot because I do this" and "I'd have to be an idiot to do this". And maybe you disagree. But it seems like it resonates with some audience at least. Which suffices for me.

Calling this a lifestyle business seems off. I'd wager for most, these are livelihood businesses; lifestyle sounds more of an affectation. Or, more simply, these are small businesses, full stop. We have a working term for these and many political forces claim to be about the. Then again, many or most political forces accomplish much less than they propose.

> "lifestyle business" always being uttered in contempt.

This must be correlated with peer group and/or geography. I am in a mountain west city surrounded by skiers, cyclists and climbers. Lifestyle business is never mentioned in contempt, rather as a logical choice to support ones hobbies and outside interests.

>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).

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.

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.

Its not as hard to recognize good craftsmanship in furniture as in other types of products.

https://www.thosmoser.com/

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?"

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)

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.

I figured, but observations outside Denmark are on my side shallow ones.

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.

A thousand bucks isn't crazy expensive. This guy spent ~$6,000 (inflation adjusted) on this couch he thinks is so great.

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...?

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.

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.

There are furniture rental places. They rent pretty much the cheapest crap they can get their hands on.

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).

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.

>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).

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.)

I will bite. How do these multi-thousand-year furniture lobbyists continue to conspire to successfully frame our contemporary ideas toward their agenda?

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

"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.

>While this is true, there are billions of convenient examples everybody knows.

Well, in those days they had a billion less examples than we have today - or at least tens of thousands of common today product categories and things not yet existing.

But they also used weaponry (Zeno on infinite division), chariots (Plato on soul), pots (Plato on art), caves (Plato on reality), dice (Heraclitus on chance), and many other things.

Plus, famous examples tend to be re-invoked (same how computer vision students re-used Lena).

Both are fair points. Still, a table - or chair - is/was one of thousands of options to choose. So you might be right that good examples tend to be reproduced. Question remains why it would be a good example to begin with.

Personally I think at some point such choice became baked in into the concept of physical existence because people think in pictures and physical existence in itself is such an abstract thing. The choice of furniture however is kind of hilarious.

Personally I have always attributed my tendency of that to the fact that I sit on chairs or at a table when I talk about these types of things. So they are convenient examples to use in the moment, examples of objects that people have a good understanding of (or so they think).

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)

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.

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.

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.

There's always someone who writes the rebuttal you're writing here. I used to do it all the time as well.

It's always the same rebuttal, "why don't you just check this then", along with "well all the information is out there".

In isolation, it is true. You could spend a day going out on the internet to try to learn what kinds of join your sofa might have. I suspect you would never even have considered the problem, and that is a rather major problem.

There are a LOT of products in the world. You will not know the unknown unknowns of every item. Even the known unknowns are often not worth your while to spend time on, because a scale manufacturer can provide an item at a price below which you will not bother to check.

The fact is we're all dependent on people making the honest choices when they're offering us stuff, you can't check it all.

Crypto bros are like this. 100% behind the product . Most don’t even know how a database works or that crypto is that. It’s only magic words….

Crypto bro? Databases? What?

Anyways, for the crowd, in another post, you say: "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."

Sounds like you completely understand my point

Sorry the crypto argument was for one post beneath you. But yes I get your point.

> It's always the same rebuttal, "why don't you just check this then", along with "well all the information is out there".

What's is this thing you're always seeing attempting to be rebutted? I'd love to hear more specifics.

> I suspect you would never even have considered the problem, and that is a rather major problem.

I worked my butt off from a college dropout waiter to get to the point that I had enough money to care about this and specifically did. I'm glad I was able to afford a shitty sofa in the interim. You are mindreading and myopic.

> The fact is we're all dependent on people making the honest choices when they're offering us stuff, you can't check it all.

3rd try: when we come down from the castles in the air, what are we asking for here?

What I'm saying is capitalism isn't working the way people say that it works, and the way people want it to work. Now obviously a lot of ink has been spilled about what exactly capitalism is, so you're not going to get a mathematically specific list of definitions that everyone agrees on.

But the main idea is that modern businesses are undermining the efficient allocation of resources.

> therefore something(?) should be illegal

What did I say should be made illegal?

> You are mindreading and focused on putting down the messenger.

No I'm not. Suspecting that you've never thought about sofa joins is very reasonable, you might be the only person I've ever communicated with who has ever done this. You feel put down because I think you're not a sofa expert?

> Why not discuss this amorphous idea that is always attempted to be rebutted and never can be?

If you want to discuss amorphous ideas you will need to accept they might have some merit. Not being able to put your finger on something can be challenging, but that doesn't mean there's nothing there.

> Again, when we come down from the castles in the air, what are we asking for here?

Is that a requirement? I have to have a demand? Sorry, but I'm writing a few thoughts from the comfort of my bed and expecting others to constructively contribute, like one does here.

"Look, all you need to do is educate yourself a bit on the engineering details of every individual kind of durable good that you will ever purchase..."

I have literally no idea what joins my sofa has. I own far too many things to check the seams and joints on everything I have ever bought.

There's a motte and bailey here.

Motte: "people tell me to go to North Korea for my idea that it should be illegal to make couches with the wrong joins, use license agreements, or air ads that don't match my eventual experience",

Bailey: "I don't know what a join is, and I shouldn't need to"

Again, I ask: What's actually being proposed here? If nothing, is this just white collar barroom conversation, via griping?

The proposal is that it should be illegal to make couches with bad joins, yes. Or do so in a way that isn't completely obvious, rather than me having to check the actual join.

Setting aside my shock at you invoking motte-and-bailey here, given that I'd apply it to your counterargument first, here are some concrete proposals:

- Ban most of the advertising as it's known today, recognizing it for the cancer on modern society that it is (see: [0]);

- Make vendors pay for costs of disposal of their products; this would curtail the profitability of shit-tier products and planned obsolescence;

- Institute a carbon tax; this will improve things across the board.

[0] - http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html

"Shock", my goodness.

You are right, but the very need to do the hard work of informing yourself, to the point of becoming a semi expert in sofa construction and what to look for, reduces the value of what the sofa-seller is offering. The point of an economy where everyone specialises on what they are good at, is that you the buyer don’t need to become an expert. Its part of the value addition. This value addition mechanism is failing in your argument [because I need to become a semi expert first, i.e. this isn’t part of what I am buying]

The problem here is trust. The trust that the monetary amount I am paying is equivalent to the real value I am getting. And that our society accepts that it is a sound business model if this trust is broken.

How do I check what joins a sofa has? Companies won’t tell me, and don’t have to tell me. I can’t start tearing apart sofas in the showroom.

I’d love a world where companies had to simply, and truthfully, explain how their products were built, maybe even do some standard testing and tell me how long it’s likely to last.

It's very much an information problem. One needs a company that can go do all the research and tell their readers what stuff is well made and good quality.

Things like Consumer Reports and Which are supposed to full this niche but they only assess big brands (and are probably under used by people).

>It's very much an information problem. One needs a company that can go do all the research and tell their readers what stuff is well made and good quality.

This role used to be filled by reputable stores.

Curating stuff means:

You aren't offering most of the things people can imagine,

You aren't offering all the latest trendy stuff, important in the moment,

You're paying people to check the quality of your limited range of dusty goods.

(Wikipedia has solved this problem by having an army of 120,000 active and mostly conscientious volunteer editors, but that's some kind of magic trick or luck that cannot be deliberately copied into other domains.)

Small business stores mostly had lousy selection and wanted to sell you what they had in stock for the most part. Yes, you had some niche labor of love businesses, but those were the minority. Information used to be really hard to come by outside of a few sources like Consumer Reports.

Doesn't help you at all when the company waits until the review is done (possibly speeding it up by soliciting independent reviews early), and then swaps out the components and manufacturing process for cheaper, worse one, without changing the product name and the SKU. Big brands have already been caught red-handed doing it; most recent big story I recall was about hard drives.

Or the automotive way, giving reviewers a full vacation in Tahiti with all things included that happens to include a test drive of their new car somewhere, making sure they're ahem all relaxed so they can give a completely fair and unbiased review.

This also assumes that there is actual competition to be compared, but corporations are surprisingly bandwagony.

E.g. look at phone, car, TV or any other similar markets and just how homogenous they became.

Heck, my mobile phone reviewers are outright quitting because that whole billion $ market is pretty much stagnant.

They would be a much more critical and well-functioning part of the economy (performing vital information-discovery and dissemination functions) if advertising was banned or at least severely curtailed.

That leaves a market gap and then a better company can fill it, unlike centralized economies. Is that happening? I would say yes, at least in some cases. High-quality, direct-to-consumer brands are great. I rely on purchasing guides for many of my buys and those point me to brands whose primary attribute is quality (or cost effectiveness) instead of marketing or historic adoption. That's great for me and great for the company!

But many people haven't adapted to ecommerce like that. I think that will change as people learn to have more suspicion and place more of their trust in neutral third parties (historically how you made purchases when everything was local and your community gossiped about which places were good and bad). Yeah, there will be issues when those third parties turn out not to be trustworthy (like Yelp), but I think overall the ability to make well-informed purchasing decisions has never been higher. People are just slow to change their habits for this new world.

I really don't believe people will be able to adapt to navigating a system that is designed (and constantly redesigned) to make them buy cheap garbage. Young people are not much more tech-literate than their elders.

> That leaves a market gap and then a better company can fill it, unlike centralized economies. Is that happening?

Not really, as the gradient points towards those companies cheapening out or folding. After all, under information asymmetry, companies that sell low-quality crap for mid-level price and lie about their product quality outcompete those selling mid-quality goods for mid-level price honestly.

> I rely on purchasing guides for many of my buys and those point me to brands whose primary attribute is quality (or cost effectiveness) instead of marketing or historic adoption. That's great for me and great for the company!

That's assuming any of those guides aren't paid advertisements, which I believe most are. Even Wirecutter is questionable nowadays. And that's before considering that manufacturers do stuff like giving first high-quality batch of products to reviewers, and then, couple months down the line, swapping components and process for cheaper, low-quality ones, but retaining the SKU.

> companies that sell low-quality crap for mid-level price and lie about their product quality outcompete those…

100%, and to make matters worse - the consequences don’t even matter to them. They don’t care if people find out, because all they have to do is outlast that medium price/quality point business and they’ve won, and once they’ve won, it’s game over, that middle section isn’t coming back anytime soon.

Nope. Marketers always spam, buy or copy any “neutral third party” to death.

With increasing size of corporations (which buyout competition to create market monopolies) the market economy is turning into a centralized economy, isn't it?

Just instead of an entity called "political party" it's being directed by board of directors of said corporations. And they're very effective at lobbying further to decrease chances of market competition as well.

So the system you're describing is not actually happening to the extent we need in the wild, we're drifting away from market economies to centralized economies.

The political system angle is a red herring, imo. The issue is how is money created, who gets to create it, and what sort of political economy then grows around it. Our system is based on private entities creating money out of thin air and then charging interest on it. Everybody else must service these debts so continual "growth" is baked into the system.

IMF (surprisingly) allowed two economists to take a look at an alternative.

Chicago Plan Revisited, 2012

https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2012/wp12202.PDF

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_plan

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_plan

Doing a quick read: this appears to be the Gold Standard by another name.

Irving Fischer is associated with it, and Fischer was a mentor/inspiration to Milton Friedman, who, amongst other things, gave us:

> The Friedman doctrine, also called shareholder theory, is a normative theory of business ethics advanced by economist Milton Friedman which holds that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.[1] This shareholder primacy approach views shareholders as the economic engine of the organization and the only group to which the firm is socially responsible. As such, the goal of the firm is to increase its profits and maximize returns to shareholders.[1] Friedman argues that the shareholders can then decide for themselves what social initiatives to take part in, rather than have an executive whom the shareholders appointed explicitly for business purposes decide such matters for them.[2]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

You know, the philosophy that Boeing's management has been following the last decade or so.

The post that you are replying to wrote:

> The thing that seems to characterize the economy now is that businesses will violate your trust in order to make money.

Under the ideology of Fischer and Friedman this is just fine. So I'm not sure putting forward an economic idea ("Chicago plan") by them would really help in preventing/reducing/rolling back 'Late Stage Capitalism' (or whatever) or accelerate its effects more. Probably the latter.

There is an abstract in the paper which is more authoritative than wikipedia. You should read the paper. Also whatever Friedman said or did is entirely irrelevant to the so-called Chicago Plan - it's not called the Friedman plan after all :

At the height of the Great Depression a number of leading U.S. economists advanced a proposal for monetary reform that became known as the Chicago Plan. It envisaged the separation of the monetary and credit functions of the banking system, by requiring 100% reserve backing for deposits. Irving Fisher (1936) claimed the following advantages for this plan:

(1) Much better control of a major source of business cycle fluctuations, sudden increases and contractions of bank credit and of the supply of bank-created money.

(2) Complete elimination of bank runs.

(3) Dramatic reduction of the (net) public debt.

(4) Dramatic reduction of private debt, as money creation no longer requires simultaneous debt creation.

We study these claims by embedding a comprehensive and carefully calibrated model of the banking system in a DSGE model of the U.S. economy. We find support for all four of Fisher's claims. Furthermore, output gains approach 10 percent, and steady state inflation can drop to zero without posing problems for the conduct of monetary policy.

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

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.

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.

This equally applies to beds and mattresses and kitchens and probably a lot of other furniture-related stuff too.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Good luck convincing the chinese worker that made your phone of the merits of capitalism.

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.

Economic growth by itself means nothing for the working class. Without redistribution it amounts to exactly zero improvement of their living conditions.

Below is a link to a news coverage of a study that claims to have shown that while poverty (as defined by the world bank) dropped spectacularly in 1980s China, the inability to afford essential commodities skyrocketed in the early 1990s, and didn't recover fully since.

https://theconversation.com/chinas-capitalist-reforms-are-sa...

Thanks for the link. I don’t buy it. It does not match what I have directly observed, and seems to be mostly moving the goal posts. In purchasing power parity, the average Chinese person is massively better off today than in 1980, there’s simply no way around that.

Ok. What I meant to convey, is that I (personally) don't believe the exploitation part was necessary in the (undeniable) uplifting of the average Chinese. And that a lot of Chinese workers are still alienated, putting upwards of 12 hours a day on soul-crushing jobs.

I believe there are more effective ways of lifting populations out of poverty.

> I believe there are more effective ways of lifting populations out of poverty.

I think you may be right. Unfortunately, what I have observed is that every attempt otherwise so far has failed. I think any approach which requires strong social and philosophical alignment will fail within a few generations, because the intrinsic motivation of humans includes an element of greed that seems impossible to stamp out. Systems that acknowledges and harnesses this fact of humanity show significantly more progress, even as they too have downsides.

I refuse to believe humans are fundamentally greedy. Primitive societies where built on favors and sharing, after all. We just live in an economic system that rewards greed and (some) anti-social behaviors.

As for other ways to get out of poverty, we could compare China with South Korea, for example. The latter implemented rather protectionist standards on exports, and as a result was able to focus its economy on improving the country. As it stands now, a lot of Chinese citizens are still dirt poor while South Koreans can almost (economically) rival with citizens of the global North.

3tubs × 40gal/tub × $3.50/gal = $420.

Wow, you're spending $420 on shipping? How far away are they keeping those slaves?

Shipping doesn't use gasoline, it uses bunker fuel, which is currently about $700/ton. There are 4k gallons in a ton of such fuel, so approximately 18c/gallon. So the shipping cost in fuel should be about $20, which amusingly checks out.

Of course the cost in greenhouse gasses is astronomical, which is a big part of the problem.

Might I introduce you to a concept called "hyperbole"?

Shipping doesn't come by car, with gasoline bought at a US gas station.

I agree that such mockery isn't very charitable, but there is an underlying line logic to their thinking. We know that a system like North Korea's is possible. We know a system like ours is possible. We don't have any evidence that any other system is actually possible.

Sure you could imagine something better. But such a system could very easily have fatal flaws you didn't imagine. In fact, North Korea started as just such a utopian ideal.

You could also argue that we used to have a system that was better than this. But if that system ultimately became this one, than reverting to the previous state would likely at some point result in the current state occurring again.

So in a sense "Do you want to live in North Korea?" is the only valid question.

I think North Korea was always an authoritarian state from the get go, it was built by the soviets over the ruins of the Korean war. It's just coated in a socialist paintjob just like many other dictatorships.

You're right in that reverting to a previous system will always be a temporary solution, but I don't believe there is any perfect system able to endure until the end of times.

"Do you want to live in North Korea?" should never be used as an argument against any kind of reforms deemed "socialist" by the Right.

As a start, would it be so bad to implement a carbon tax? Tighter control of human rights on foreign imports? Stronger social nets? The list goes on...

Sure. I agree Many of those things would be a net benefit. So why don't we have them?

It seems to me, the main reason is that representatives won't vote for them. Why not? Mainly because their financial and political incentives are structured in such a way that they can't. Why are these incentives like this? You can keep peeling back layers of the onion like this forever, but as some point you realize it's just due to structures of the system that will recreate themselves in any similar system. Like how wings evolved separately in different evolutionary branches but all conform to a similar structure. Any capitalist economic system will have methods for vested interests to inhibit many types of positive change.

Humm sure, I agree with most of what you said.

I want to believe we can have a better economic system, not necessarily capitalistic, maybe one where resource allocation is achieved more democratically.

Capitalism, with all its flaws, was still an improvement over feudalism. I refuse to believe it can't get any better.

What are you talking about. You can commission making the furniture you want, heck you can even get an Amish craftsman to use non mechanical tools to build it. The reality is the folks in non capitalist countries often sit on the ground on pillows and sometimes don’t have couches because of the cost. Thanks to capitalism people can decide whether they want to spend mid 5 figures for a high quality couch or go with an affordable $1500-$800 couch. In raw time, the couch doesn’t cost mid five figures, if you want that, you need to know a family member willing to sacrifice opportunity cost to make you that couch. Otherwise you pay a luxury premium because they can make more, making the cheap stuff.

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.

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.

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).

> 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.

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.

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.

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?

No, not like that.

> 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.

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.

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-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).

> 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.)

> 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.

There's value in identifying what the incentive structure is doing even if it can only be expressed in anthropomorphic terms.

"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-econom...

https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/economic-fac...

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

That leather is from one cow??

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.

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.

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.

> 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 and my comment history more generally, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Scarry#Personal_life_a...

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reuJ8yVCgSM (2017)

To which places are you referring?

Curious minds want to know of where you speak…

If it’s where I think, my brother already lives there but the immigration process is formidable.

(I've edited the original post; could easily be where you think)

The process became much easier for our neighbours while I've been here, which, being zero-sum for available slots, is to say it became more formidable for the Old Country. As of today, I wouldn't be surprised if it's easier to get in from Tunisia than from Texas.

It could be tougher; no one ever asked me if I could make a roux :-)

EDIT: I couldn't rapidly find GDP splits by firm size, but an easy comparison is that ~3/4 of all employees work for SMEs here, as opposed to under 1/2 for the Old Country. (Germany's figures are similar, and they claim over half their GDP comes from SMEs.)

Oops: went a level too deep on Stern-Brocot, that should be ~2/3 (more than germany, at ~55%)

Indeed, my surmise about your location was correct.

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.

It boils down to giving people freedom but the world is being destroyed or communism (it has its own problems).

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 :)

> 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. :)

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.

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-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.

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.

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

(edited typo)

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.

At some point a politician does have to make a decision on these things.

The decision won't look like "should anyone who introduces an additional brand of deodorant be thrown in prison?" but more like "should we give a tax break to this deodorant company here, or to that aerospace company there?" Or "should deodorant imports from China be treated as healthcare products, at a 15% tariff, or cosmetics, which get a 30% tariff?"

When making that decision, you need to take into account whether your citizens already have adequate suppliers of deodorant and cruise missiles.

You might not like this situation, and have an idealistic answer like "We shouldn't have tax breaks for anyone, there should be a flat corporate tax of X%", but you're not going to get that genie back into the bottle.

> Only the market, where consumers put their hard-earned dollars at work, can tell us how many brands of deodorant are needed.

Not even 'the market' can do this. Unless you mean it in some sort of tautological sense - e.g. only the market can tell us how many brands of deodorant the market can bear.

Brands are dead now. We have arbitrary number of deodorant brands, as producers can, and do, create new brands all the time, and recycle or trade old ones. Between this and influx of faux brands for white-label dropshipped goods, there's very little signal in brand labeling today.

Creating new brands all time time is poor for creating consumer loyalty, which is the entire point of a brand. You are missing the whole point!

Nobody cares about customer loyalty anymore, that's the entire point! Customers still loyal to brands are just marks about to be exploited.

I think you yourself are loyal to more brands than you would admit! I can’t imagine you never eat from the same restaurant twice, buy from the same e-commerce website twice, or use the same brand of toilet paper twice.

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

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.

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

The goal isn't necessarily to eliminate the bottom tier from the market. The issue isn't with that, but with the tendency for the market to hollow out, which results in there being no middle-tier products available at all. You have a variety of products ranging from literally shit to figuratively shit, then nothing, then high-end custom-made professional grade stuff you can't afford, and probably can't source unless you know someone who knows someone. Any business trying to do OK stuff for OK price is forced to either sink to the bottom-tier, or become a niche high-end brand.

Or, in short: the problem isn't that I can buy cheap crap. The problem is that I cannot buy moderately expensive good stuff - there's only cheap shit, and moderately expensive shit pretending to be good (and then the good stuff I can't possibly afford).

This is indeed hard to solve. But there is need for a solution. Not because I want a good couch for 4 figures, but because we should have more sustainable and goomd couches. Not just for reducing environmental impact, but also for improving quality of life and financials for all but the poorest, by letting them actually get long lasting furniture.

Currently anyone who would produce that needs to compete with IKEA, and somehow needs to convince customers that their furniture will last longer. Currently the best way to do that is hand-cut dovetails and only hardwoods. But there's quality to be had with modern solutions that are muuuch cheaper than the old methods.

> Currently anyone who would produce that needs to compete with IKEA, and somehow needs to convince customers that their furniture will last longer.

To be honest, IKEA isn’t the problem here. Their stuff is above average quality / longevity until you’re at least a couple levels up in the market. The last time we were looking for furniture, it was eye-opening to see how many companies are trying to charge 2-4 times more for IKEA or lower quality furniture, where something looked nice from across the showroom but if you looked closer it was all sawdust and cheap plastic components.

Ikea already understood that there is a market for this kind of goods. They sell a few hardwood furnitures which are not crazy expensive.

(and there is another point that belongs to this conversation, even if not addressed in the OP.)

3. Sustainability: Everything will have to be replaced eventually, even repairable sofas. It is important when constructing a piece of furniture (or anything else) how will the parts be recycled? We should aspire an ecosystem that goes: buy -> repair -> repair -> recycle.

Ikea sofas can be underrated. My wife bought a Grönlid loveseat at a consignment store (read: it wasn't even new) for $100 and we enjoyed it for almost 9 years. No sagging or falling apart, it remained comfortable until the day we sold it or gave it away - I don't recall now.

Hmm, grön lid is Swedish for "green suffer!", message unclear.

Lid has more meanings though. It can also mean "inclination" or "hillside" (roughly) which makes more sense in the context. Grönlid would then be a green hillside or green slope or similar. Which sounds like a nice place to lay down and relax for a bit.

Yes, I may possibly have noticed that before commenting, cannot confirm or deny.

I have an Ikea leather sofa which is still going strong after 10+ years.

That's a part of IKEA's appeal. Because of the consistent quality and the extensive market share, there's a lively secondary market for the furniture. At least in Europe. You simply cannot sell (or even give away) similarly priced furniture of other brands but there's demand for second hand IKEA.

> not making cheap crap. You can find some way to disincentivize making cheap stuff. Ban IKEA.. etc.

As I type my keyboard is sitting on an Ikea desk. It's cheap, it's simple, it does the job and I'm happy with it.

Cheap stuff is not the problem. Crappy cheap stuff (and crappy expensive stuff!!!) is.

For example, I have two radios in my house that I don't use? Why because the crappy power leads have frayed and I can only use them with batteries.

Or again, I bought a kettle 2 years ago that stopped working after 6 months.

I've got plenty of relatively cheap things in my house, including a few from Ikea, that are perfectly good for what I use them for. And I've also bought things like relatively high-end small appliances that crapped out in short order.

And it's often very hard to tell which is which in advance--and it may very well be the luck of the draw in any case.

Even an obviously cheaper Ikea dresser I have in my bedroom. Yeah, it's cheaply made and was sort of a pain to assemble. But it looks and works fine and I'm not sure I could have even gotten a hardwood dresser that cost 5x as much into the space.

Labor costs don’t rise tenfold with proper wood though. It’s the same wooden board they have to cut and mount. US wood-based markets are notoriously ridiculous.

No, but perhaps labor drops tenfold with switching from proper wood to glue mixed with toilet paper. You throw sheets of that pulp on a machine that laminates them, then throw that on a CNC cutter, add a bag with some screws and glue, a sheet with instructions, and ship the complete flat-pack piece of furniture to customer. Not much human labor involved, and it scales well.

Yeah, but you can do exactly that with proper wood too. As far as I understand, there's no reasonably priced option like this in US. Feels like this either-or extremity is a learned coping strategy for something going wrong with wood at US end. And with matresses, and table tops. That something's going wrong at the other ends is well-known, but it doesn't have to correlate 100% with the problem.

Along the same line it's always interesting to see Americans discuss mattress prices, it's always like "yeah best pay 4-6k at least and they're swapping the names and reviews so there's no way to tell if you're getting a quality product regardless" meanwhile I paid like 250 euros for a locally made memory foam mattress that's a dream (ha) to sleep on.

Post-socialist countries still have an absolute shit ton of these lifestyle businesses or even medium sized firms instead of monopolist megacorps which results in a very competitive market and has turned out to be quite an upside for the end consumer.

I feel the same when they talk about renovations. "thank god the kitchen only came to $45k", "the bathroom remodel was only $30k", "the new fence was $20k, not too bad". I know the have bigger spaces but... damn.

Though home renovation costs are mostly about local labor costs for tradesmen. I suppose I could spend an ungodly amount in a kitchen on super-premium appliances but more likely the bulk of the cost is masons, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, the local shop putting together the cabinets/counters/etc. You can also save a lot of money by being selective as opposed to hiring someone to do a complete makeover.

The problem is that you're talking of massively freeloading social an environmental costs of humongous size onto other people and places. Sure, "flatpack sawdust and glue" furniture made by slave labour while destroying rainforests and dumping toxic waste is cheap for you and right now... But that can't last and won't last.

Sofa manufacture is not what's destroying rainforests or dumping toxic waste.

And "flatpack sawdust" is better for the environment, actually -- where do you think all those leftover wood scraps would be going if they weren't mixed with glue and used productively?

If you want to be using solid pieces of wood in everything, that's a lot more trees you're going to have to cut down.

My late grandmother had some pieces of furniture that were between 300 and 400 year old. We need less stuff and particularly less new stuff. A 400 year-old wardrobe ("armoire normande") is exactly as good as any new one to store your clothes, has much more character, and may still be just as good in the centuries to come.

That's wonderful if you only move a few times in your whole life, and always have space in your bedroom for a wardrobe, and like the style.

It's impossible if you move apartments every couple/few years, the bedrooms come with closets and there's no good place to put the wardrobe and you don't need it anyways because you have closets, and sure it has "character" but it looks completely out of place because it's the wrong character.

If you want to preserve antique furniture and are able to, then more power to you. There are lots of antique furniture enthusiasts.

But I don't want an antique wardrobe any more than I want to wear a high-collared four-button men's sack suit from 1885.

> 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

Could you elaborate? I'm not quite understanding your point, and I may be misinterpreting the sentence.

The median household income in the US is $76k ($57k post taxes). Germany is $54k ($34k post taxes). China is $13k.

Even compared to Europe the amount of money for spending a US household gets is almost twice as much. There's more expenses due to a lack of a social net however those aren't constant over time unlike taxes. One year you spend $5k for medical bills and the next you spend $5k on a new Sofa.

Yeah but sounds like this guy has owned a house in Canada for the past 25 years

"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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

That the entire context you posted for the conclusion doesn't seem to be based on even an attempt to understand whether the market has truly changed.

For that matter, it's also not clear if his sofa is particularly well made (we never see the frame in the article) or just expensive enough that it's worth re-holstering for the price he was quoted...because the article in question is someone who's $1,200 sofa would distinctly not be worth paying $1,100 to re-upholster.

That's correct, the only two conceivable possibilities are "everything exactly the way it currently is" and "everything exactly the way it was in Soviet Russia".

The world is not binary.

I imagine that is why he called out "late capitalism" rather than "capitalism".

The twenty-first century did not invent cheap goods of dubious quality.

That's correct. It invented expensive goods of dubious quality. If you want a cheap good and you buy a cheap good and it's cheap, that's all fine. More power to you. Problems come when the quality level you want is possible to manufacture, even profitably, but isn't manufactured because market said no.

I think you underestimate how expensive goods of good quality used to be. I have no good source for that though; just an impression that things used to be pricier.

This is just whataboutism. Maybe you don’t know this but there are many alternatives to both neo-capitalism and authoritarianism.

Tim is not blaming capitalism. Without wanting to put words in his mouth, I think he’s blaming unfettered capitalism and its winner-take-all bullshit where the majority of the participants in the economy fail to benefit from it.

My next business will - very intentionally - be a lifestyle business, but it’s been really hard to find a niche where I can build a quality moat against massive players. The odds are stacked against us smaller players because of an accumulation of capital which is unnecessary and less efficient than alternatives.

You can blather on all you like about capitalism being better than communism but the kind of capitalism we’re getting is no better for us than the kind of communism we’ve fought against.

To quote someone on HN some years ago - I apologise that I didn’t keep the URL - “The US government's democracy is at most the same as the Soviet Union's communism, merely something to cover the way that those in power divide the loot.”

Doesn't remove the fact that we had good sofas 40 years ago.

Perhaps capitalism is only good while it's kept in check by the menace of communism.

He paid somewhere between 3 and 4 thousand dollars for that couch in 1999, which is probably over $6k in today's money. Sure a $999 leather couch from Ikea may not be the greatest, but is it really so impossible to get a good quality leather couch for $6500 today? That sounds ridiculous to me actually, I'm certain that you could find many great options at that price. And I don't believe that mere availability of cheaper options is somehow a bad thing.

Exactly. I bought my couch and chair $4400 (CAD) on sale (about 40% off list) in 2008. I recall some people thought I was insane for spending so much money on a couch. I thought the price was fair after doing a lot of research, and the sale at the time was awesome. Also, a 20 year warranty on the frame.

Today, buying a couch and chair on sale for $6300 sounds like a lot of money, but I imagine I'd need to budget at least as much. Not from the same company though, they now sell shit couches for $2500 and people complain the quality is garbage and capitalism is failing. Or.... maybe you are just a cheap SOB.

I still have the same couch and chair, now super comfy, though it took years to break in. Leather is in excellent condition.

Would you honestly prefer someone calling it en-sit-ification, combining "cleverness" with a Doctorow meme?

Right. I didn't think so.

Also, the sofas of the USSR are not relevant to the conversation any more than pre-capitalist couches are.

I am sorry, but the late socialist Soviet Union is a really bad example here - you want to compare 2 democracies with different economic attitudes, like the US and Germany (today).

The Soviet Union had a lot of problems that prevented the people there from the life they deserved. There were many monkey businesses from the US side, too.

Gorbachev tried to fix it and steer the system from a shitty corrupted communism to a more western socialism. Unfortunately for him the russians and honestly the rest of the world, he failed.

Remember it's never either this or that. The best system takes the good part from every attitude. The rigid, dichotomic attitude of the last century is the root of the problem, not communism or capitalism.

Those sofas were about the same as what you'd buy at IKEA today, maybe even a bit more sturdy. And they basically were an IKEA kind of product: cheap and mass produced.

Interestingly, a Soviet-era sofa in good condition is now worth quite a bit for its retro properties.

Pay peanuts get monkeys.

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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