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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?"

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...?

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.

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.

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