[HN Gopher] American Seating's original and largest market was s...
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       American Seating's original and largest market was school furniture
        
       Author : antismarm
       Score  : 32 points
       Date   : 2022-07-01 23:09 UTC (23 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (twitter.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
        
       | tsomctl wrote:
       | I was working across the street from the high school today, and
       | was watching some kids race down the street in office chairs. But
       | they weren't cheap Costco ones, they were metal and obviously
       | from the school. I was thinking that they must be really well
       | made.
        
         | asdff wrote:
         | Schools absolutely burn cash on furniture these days. Even when
         | I was in high school it was bad. School administrators went to
         | an apple store and had to buy those expensive huge solid wood
         | tables they had for the common areas, which people promptly
         | defaced in a few years. Wooden lockers too in the new wing, but
         | they had those crappy cabinet hinges that tend to pop off with
         | typical usage, so half the lockers would end up crooked and
         | apathetic kids would slam them anyhow and legitimately damage
         | the door at that point.
        
           | woodruffw wrote:
           | This probably varies widely by state and even
           | county/district. My NYC public schools had hard plastic
           | everything; the only non-plastic surfaces were sheet-metal
           | lockers and soapstone lab counters. And I went to a well-
           | funded school with lots of extra alumni cash.
        
           | lordnacho wrote:
           | You can buy the tables from the Apple store? Really?
        
             | blamazon wrote:
             | Not literally from the Apple store as a merchant, but you
             | can get the same style of tables, yes.
             | 
             | A web search turned up these folks who may be involved in
             | the actual Apple store tables:
             | 
             | https://fetzerwood.com/
        
           | KerrAvon wrote:
           | I'm pretty sure that's not the case in most public high
           | schools in the US. Parents would go apeshit if they wasted
           | money like that.
        
             | Pulcinella wrote:
             | Schools burn cash in a "it's expensive to be poor" kind of
             | way. The desks in the schools I worked in were practically
             | consumable, only lasting a couple of years before needing
             | to be replaced. It's impressive in a frustrating way:
             | manufacturers have finally figured out the exact minimum
             | amount of material and exactly how shoddy and few the welds
             | can be to produce a desk and still be able to sell them.
             | There is absolutely no bracing so sitting on them bends
             | everything out of tolerance until a weld fails or the 4
             | legs are splayed out flat against the floor.
        
       | cardamomo wrote:
       | This is tangentially related, as the Twitter thread focuses
       | exclusively on seating, but if you're interested in the designers
       | and companies that have shaped school and other aspects of
       | children's lives, I highly recommend "The Design of Childhood" by
       | Alexandra Lange. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/design-of-
       | childhood-9781632866...
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | mc32 wrote:
       | Tell you what. At least the ones I'd used were damn well built.
       | The absolute beating those things took and withstood. Paint got
       | chipped was about it. Maybe the arm drooped a bit from those
       | days' big kids.
        
         | dietrichepp wrote:
         | Only if you had short hair. If you had long hair, the chairs
         | would try to eat it.
        
         | systemvoltage wrote:
         | Library bookshelves are cool as well. Overbuilt. Insanely
         | robust. Those bookends don't move, the rest of the earth does.
        
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       (page generated 2022-07-02 23:00 UTC)