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Comment by roughly | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?"

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.

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.

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