[HN Gopher] Parable of the Sofa
___________________________________________________________________
Parable of the Sofa
Author : zdw
Score : 483 points
Date : 2024-06-02 05:57 UTC (17 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (www.tbray.org)
| kgeist wrote:
| >Sofas made in the past 15 years or so are absolute garbage,
| constructed of sawdust compressed and bonded with cheap glue,
| simple brackets in place of proper joinery, substandard spring
| design, flimsy foam, and a lot of staples.
|
| Interesting, I didn't know it's the case everywhere, not only in
| my country. Several beds/sofas we bought in the last 5-10 years
| had such poor quality they cracked in multiple places already and
| had to be fixed or replaced. Meanwhile a bed produced in 1970
| changed 3 owners and still was in perfect condition when we
| replaced it (for the only reason of looking "oudated", which I
| regret now).
| sokoloff wrote:
| High quality furniture is still being made and sold, just not
| for $300 for a couch.
|
| Cheap shit is going to be cheap shit.
|
| Growing up, furniture was something that was expensive,
| carefully shopped for, and hand delivered fully assembled. I
| see the availability of cheap (to make and to transport)
| furniture as filling a gap in the market previously not
| addressed, but if you're in a position to buy a piece you'd
| like to keep 15 years, maybe IKEA and Wayfair aren't the right
| furniture vendor for you. High quality furniture wasn't an
| inflation-adjusted $300/couch back then either.
| roughly wrote:
| 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.
| MeImCounting wrote:
| Its not as hard to recognize good craftsmanship in
| furniture as in other types of products.
|
| https://www.thosmoser.com/
| portaouflop wrote:
| I don't see why that should be the case.
|
| As someone who rarely/never buys furniture I have no idea
| what good craftsmanship looks like in the finished
| product.
| db48x wrote:
| You can recognize particleboard, can't you? That's low
| quality. Cardboard covered with wood veneer is another
| trick, but you can recognize that by its unnatural
| lightness. Low quality again. Then look at the joints
| between pieces. If the wood is shaped so that the pieces
| fit into each other, then that is high quality. If they
| are joined by screws, metal plates, or glue, then that is
| low quality (or medium, in some cases).
|
| It's not really that hard, although of course with a
| couch the upholstery can hide a lot of sins.
| portaouflop wrote:
| Fair enough.
|
| I do know that heavy furniture is probably higher
| quality.
|
| But that's about it.
|
| Not sure if I would spot particleboard, since it's hidden
| under paint or as you said veneer.
|
| My only realistic quality criteria are: - does it look
| old? - is it very heavy?
| db48x wrote:
| 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.
| Lio wrote:
| This is the MBA curse. Some bright spark will recognise
| that they can make a short term profit by cheapening the
| product but retaining the high price.
|
| ...but if they don't then other firms selling crappy (but
| "good enough") products cheap will still drive quality
| products out of the market. To stay even slight competitive
| quality manufacturers will avoid investing in new processes
| or equipment so that they can sell what they currently make
| slightly cheaper.
|
| Either way the products go to shit.
| geodel wrote:
| 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.
| condiment wrote:
| There's plenty of good furniture out there, made by plenty
| of good brands that haven't sold out. We seem to have
| forgotten that brands build cachet for a lot of reasons,
| quality being only one of them. The main issue today is
| that we've inadvertently traded off quality for variety -
| there's a huge variety of furniture being made, in every
| conceivable style, size, and texture. But if you want good
| stuff, you have to pay in time and money to get it, and you
| might not be able to get exactly what you want.
|
| Which is why it's strange to see people surprised that
| their $3,800 CB2 sectional isn't built to the same standard
| of quality as a $13,000 Roche Bobois sectional. Especially
| when they could have easily gone to the showroom and lifted
| a section up by a corner to learn exactly what they were
| buying. Or gone online and searched for clones, or called
| up any interior decorator in the region and just asked
| "where do I get a good couch?"
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Yeah... maybe, theoretically you could assess if the
| expensive furniture was crap or not but in practice it's
| problematic, so you pay for some expensive crap.
|
| Also the thing is that IKEA hollowed out the middle market,
| there is only cheap crap, medium crap but still crap,
| expensive crap that masquerades as expensive quality, and
| expensive quality.
|
| The sofa that the author bought was not expensive quality, it
| was medium quality. Medium quality is good enough for just
| about anything but it probably isn't beautiful and high
| quality. The stuff you are seeing around from the old days in
| that are more sturdy than modern things are generally not the
| expensive stuff, because that stuff is still expensive. It's
| the medium stuff.
|
| There is no longer any more medium stuff.
|
| Thanks, IKEA.
|
| On edit: feelings on matter may be colored by living in
| Denmark, which may be more affected by IKEA than other
| countries (proximity to Sweden, Danish habit of everyone
| agreeing on one way of doing things and then there is no
| other way)
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's not Denmark-specific. Hollowing out the middle has
| happened across every product and service class everywhere
| in the west. It's a broad problem, in no way limited to
| sofas.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I figured, but observations outside Denmark are on my
| side shallow ones.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| IKEA shelves and stuff are cheap (in both senses of the word,
| generally, although some pieces do hold up surprisingly
| well), but their couches in particular are somehow both crazy
| expensive and wildly uncomfortable. I remember trying one in
| the showroom that felt like a massive hard frame with some
| sagging cushions tacked on, and it was about a thousand
| bucks.
| modeless wrote:
| A thousand bucks isn't crazy expensive. This guy spent
| ~$6,000 (inflation adjusted) on this couch he thinks is so
| great.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| It's expensive relative to other couches I've bought that
| were (1) way more comfortable and (2) way more attractive
| for a similar or lower price point. In the past I've had
| $500 couches from Living Spaces that were both cute and
| felt good to sit on. Better construction too.
|
| $6k is still wild though, lol. I've also never really
| cared for leather couches, so spending that much on one
| is unthinkable to me, but maybe leather is just more
| expensive than I realized...?
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| The mid-tier has been hollowed out keeping prices high but
| increasing the profit margin. From the Dwell article:
|
| > Today's $1,000 sofa is not in the same league of
| construction as a $299 Sears sofa (about $1,100 today) from
| 1980. That thing was made of actual wood.
| bad_username wrote:
| > Late Capitalism: Check check fucking check.
|
| I think the author would stop blaming capitalism after seeing the
| atrocious sofas of the late socialist Soviet Union, which wete
| not only worse than anything, but also the only choice.
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| It's easy to criticize his conclusion when you leave out all
| the evidence for said conclusion:
|
| > But the subtext is drearily familiar. Globalization: Check.
| Cheap-labor arbitrage: Check. Tax engineering: Check. High
| profits: Check. Flat-packing: Check.
|
| Do you deny that any or all of this is happening, today, under
| capitalism? Do you deny that there are incentives for any or
| all of this under capitalism today? Do you deny that these
| things would lead to the inevitable quality decline he's
| lamenting? Let's not have any more of your straw man attacks.
| Attack the real issue instead.
| XorNot wrote:
| He spent $1100 CAD getting his sofa reupholstered, and the
| sofa itself cost over $3,000 CAD in 1999 according to the
| article (so about $5,000 today).
|
| Cheap things are cheaply made isn't news. But being able to
| have them at all, is for a lot of people, very valuable.
|
| What is not in the article is what would $5,000 buy him
| today? He doesn't know because he didn't go looking. The
| linked article in the article is someone talking about
| reupholstering a $1,000 sofa.
|
| EDIT: I mean hell, that article wants to talk about a $300
| 1965 Sears Sofa... In 2024 USD that's almost $3,000.
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| 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.
| XorNot wrote:
| 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.
| sparky_z wrote:
| 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".
| beardyw wrote:
| The world is not binary.
| simonw wrote:
| I imagine that is why he called out "late capitalism" rather
| than "capitalism".
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| The twenty-first century did not invent cheap goods of
| dubious quality.
| immibis wrote:
| 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.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| 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."
| the_gipsy wrote:
| 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.
| modeless wrote:
| 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.
| dade_ wrote:
| 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.
| drewcoo wrote:
| 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.
| yard2010 wrote:
| 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.
| riehwvfbk wrote:
| 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.
| lencastre wrote:
| Pay peanuts get monkeys.
| MeImCounting wrote:
| Just gotta get some Gomer Bolstrood.
|
| In all honesty I have no desire for furniture not made by someone
| I know or alternately made by some New England craftsman who gets
| paid more than I do and either way I want furniture that will
| last at least the next hundred years. I have no desire for
| furniture that my grandchildren wont spend a couple days fighting
| over.
| Brybry wrote:
| My experience is that there's a high probability they won't
| have space for it, or the will to refurbish it, and it will be
| sold in a garage sale or even thrown away on the curb.
| robocat wrote:
| > furniture that my grandchildren wont spend a couple days
| fighting over.
|
| Mayhap your grandpa said the same about his now worthless piano
| or car. In my experience grandchildren don't usually want their
| grandparent's furniture... That is why you can buy it so
| cheaply at the second hand shop. That expensive sofa ends up at
| the dump not the vintage store: nobody wants it.
|
| If you want classic furniture then buy the best second hand
| stuff. Why bother getting it made?
| Simon_ORourke wrote:
| The irony being that this very site's boosting of that store, in
| a modern web-driven sense, is likely to see all sorts of
| increased business for said store. Not that it's a bad thing, I'd
| like to see them getting all business they can handle. But
| there's a spectrum between the lifestyle capitalism stores like
| this and the VC-backed unicorns.
| timbray wrote:
| That crossed my mind when I saw the piece show up on HN. But I
| think they're already running more or less at capacity.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| 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.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| The framing of 'government bureaucrat' vs. 'consumer choice' is
| at best misleading. As lordnacho pointed out, such a free
| market only works _for consumers_ when the consumers have real
| agency. We exist in a state of immense information asymmetry,
| where vendors have immense advantages over the buyers. (Immense
| resources focused on highly misleading marketing vs. individual
| expertise, with attempts by consumers to organize frequently
| hijacked.) _I shouldn 't need to be a domain expert in order to
| make an informed choice._ The level of acceptance of a "free
| market" overwhelmingly dominating by deceptive marketing is
| insane.
| stana wrote:
| 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)
| defrost wrote:
| 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.
| dmurray wrote:
| 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.
| tmnvix wrote:
| > 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| 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!
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Nobody cares about customer loyalty anymore, that's the
| entire point! Customers still loyal to brands are just
| marks about to be exploited.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| 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.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| One exception that proves the rule: the best sofa we ever had was
| a hand me down from Pottery Barn c. 2009 made of softwood and
| particle board with stapled on polyester velour. Extremely easy
| to clean, easy to take apart, and easy to re-assemble. It cracked
| in the middle but I reinforced the frame and added extra feet and
| the design meant the re-stapled fabric covered all my bodges
| quite neatly.
|
| Yes, modern furniture is crap and there is an epidemic of junk
| sold at fancy prices. If you reframe your crappy sofa as
| purchasing a _sofa kit_ and pay a reasonable not-West-Elm price
| for it then it doesn't seem so bad after all.
| lordnacho wrote:
| This is something that has bothered me for a while. When we're
| discussing capitalism, people seem to get it in their head that
| it's either what we have now, or you can fuck off to North Korea.
|
| How I would characterize my ideal economy is one where the
| feedback loop works: people can make reasonable guesses about
| what a product is, how long it will work for, and what its cost
| is. They can adjust their purchases according to their needs,
| which tells us which products should exist and which should not.
| Businesses do not trick the customers into thinking a thing has
| more value than it actually does. A very large part of this
| economy is accurate information, and a very large part of
| accurate information is trust. After all nobody is going to know
| more about the product than the people who made it, and they will
| always have an interest in representing their product in the most
| positive light. Lemon problem.
|
| The thing that seems to characterize the economy now is that
| businesses will violate your trust in order to make money. They
| know that you won't read the license agreement when you sign up
| for a service, and they will use that. They know that you won't
| be checking what kind of joins your sofa has. They know that you
| won't get as much value from their items as the adverts say. All
| of these abuses can be done within the law, perhaps because these
| same businesses are involved with shaping the law.
|
| The feedback loop is broken, and this leads to the same problem
| as what the Soviet Union had. Their problem wasn't that people
| were lazy and didn't go to work. Their problem was that they made
| the wrong stuff. Things that nobody wanted, often with the same
| quality issues as what you get these days buying an item from a
| market economy. Note that GDP figures will still not know this,
| it just sees all the crap and counts the money paid for it.
|
| Often we pick on MBAs when it comes to this sort of critique, and
| there's some merit to it. If your only goal is to make money, and
| the economy is riddled with loopholes where you can make money
| without providing value, then we will have an economy that
| doesn't provide a lot of value, because MBAs are really good at
| finding these types of things.
| refulgentis wrote:
| 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.
| lordnacho wrote:
| 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.
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| 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....
| refulgentis wrote:
| 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 400EUR dollar
| shitcouch seems better than no couch at all."
|
| Sounds like you completely understand my point
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| Sorry the crypto argument was for one post beneath you.
| But yes I get your point.
| refulgentis wrote:
| > 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?
| lordnacho wrote:
| 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.
| Terr_ wrote:
| "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... "
| saagarjha wrote:
| 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.
| refulgentis wrote:
| 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?
| saagarjha wrote:
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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
| refulgentis wrote:
| "Shock", my goodness.
| shswkna wrote:
| 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.
| CJefferson wrote:
| 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.
| concordDance wrote:
| 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).
| ginko wrote:
| >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.
| card_zero wrote:
| 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.)
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| moffkalast wrote:
| 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.
| izacus wrote:
| 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.
| andrepd wrote:
| 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.
| solidasparagus wrote:
| 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.
| thrance wrote:
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _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.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| > 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.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| Nope. Marketers always spam, buy or copy any "neutral third
| party" to death.
| izacus wrote:
| 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.
| temporarely wrote:
| 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
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _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.
| temporarely wrote:
| 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._
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| May I add, cheap shit will always win if most people don't have
| the initial money to spend on quality. A 400EUR dollar shitcouch
| seems better than no couch at all.
| bunnie wrote:
| The bit about "lifestyle business" always being uttered in
| contempt resonated with me.
|
| I always assumed it was just me being overly sensitive to folks
| expressing concern over my life choices, urging me to snap out of
| my "mid-life crisis" and do something "useful" like raise money
| and scale up, or "apply myself" at famous institutions with "real
| impact".
| verisimi wrote:
| > In conversation with venture capitalists, you hear the phrase
| "lifestyle business", meaning one that is doing nicely and
| rewarding the people who run it and which isn't planning for
| unbounded growth. The words "lifestyle business" are always, of
| course, uttered in a voice dripping with contempt.
|
| This makes me wonder what other type of business is there? How
| do VCs describe their business, what is their aim? Is it to be
| 'king of the world'? Have more money than god? Have power to
| control others?
|
| If that's it, lifestyle businesses sound much more human. Who
| wants to pretend to be god, rather than being oneself?
| throwaway2562 wrote:
| The contemptuous phrase 'lifestyle business' is just VCs
| saying the quiet part out loud. You want to run a company
| that feeds your family and provides some decent stable jobs,
| indefinitely? You must be a clown, they think.
|
| The other memorably awful/ macho bullshit line I once
| personally heard when pitching an idea to a young thruster
| was: "Who gets fired?" by which the guy meant, whose jobs are
| on the line if you build your business successfully?
|
| Not all games are zero-sum, I had to tell him.
| bunnie wrote:
| 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| jprete wrote:
| 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.
| gcanyon wrote:
| 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 :-)
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| See https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&
| que...
| rcxdude wrote:
| 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.
| acdha wrote:
| 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.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| 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.
| JimDabell wrote:
| 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.
| intended wrote:
| That said - VCs / PE are effectively in the business of
| outcompeting Lifestyle businesses.
| mbravorus wrote:
| Outcompeting? Hell no. Eliminating - sure.
| brewdad wrote:
| It's the same thing when the outcome is that they "win".
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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.
| keepamovin wrote:
| 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.
| mrob wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.)
| geokon wrote:
| 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
| etrautmann wrote:
| I wasn't familiar but I assume this is what you're referring
| to?
|
| https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor
| bunnie wrote:
| Yah, that's it.
| bunnie wrote:
| 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| vinnyvichy wrote:
| >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
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| grantc wrote:
| 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.
| anthomtb wrote:
| > "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.
| rPlayer6554 wrote:
| How is "modern capitalism" to blame? Modern capitalism allowed a
| small business to sell you the higher quality option, and you
| were able to direct your purchasing power to the product you
| wanted. If you convince more consumers to do the same (like you
| are) big brands will loose money and change. That's capitalism.
|
| The best term I can come up with to describe the phenomenon you
| dislike is _modern consumerism_ (although not perfectly
| accurate). Many people now want more new stuff cheaper. That's
| what drives companies to produce things more cheaply.
| eastbound wrote:
| The capitalist part is that the new options aren't even cheaper
| anymore, but the manufacturer has cheapened out on material
| quality "because it earns more money".
|
| However, one can blame capitalism, but the soviets also used to
| cheap out on material quality, shops, distribution, wages and
| maximize bribery.
| immibis wrote:
| The Soviets were pretty capitalist. They just had an extra
| rule, that said only Dear Leader was allowed to have all the
| capital. Apart from that they worked the same way as any
| corporation while trying to pretend they were not exactly
| like a corporation (which is also something corporations do).
| hamandcheese wrote:
| > Many people now want more new stuff cheaper.
|
| Yes of course, and that's why our grandparents got fewer things
| that cost more, because that's what they wanted.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I think there's a mistake in your assumptions, in that the
| system delivers what people want. The feedback loop is broken;
| most sectors seem to be supplier-driven, which means people
| choose fuck all. Customers don't choose from space of possible
| goods of a given type - they choose out of _what 's currently
| available_. It's increasingly hard for a quality good to
| compete now, when the competition can make shit stuff for much
| cheaper _and_ lie to the customers about it being quality.
| satisfice wrote:
| Hooray for lifestyle businesses!
|
| I started my company in 1999 with my wife and I around the
| kitchen table. My vision: a consulting company that never told a
| lie to a client. With that philosophy and 25 years of work we
| have built the company into two people around the same kitchen
| table.
| nakedneuron wrote:
| Hooray to sound joins, I guess.
| piloto_ciego wrote:
| That is admirable though. I ran a little consultancy for a few
| years - it never exploded in size or grew beyond me, but I
| could always look myself in the mirror.
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| If you get out of the US bubble, the prices are simply insane
|
| fix a sofa: it's equivalent to a month's salary/stipend here in
| Asia. 200 bowls of noodle (if it's a cheap noodle then it's more
| like 500)
|
| new sofa: "new leather sofas of the "not flat-packed sawdust and
| glue" variety quickly get into five figures" So like a year's
| worth of stipend/expenses
|
| Could be that just the US dollar is crazy - but until the
| economic disbalances of the world doesn't equilibrate (that's on
| a centenial scale), it's never going to make sense to fix a sofa
|
| "But I'd sure vote for a political party that convinced me it was
| trying to achieve that"
|
| The only way you can achieve this is by going full North Korea
| and self sufficient. There is no real upside to this fantasy
| tmnvix wrote:
| A significant portion of the cost is labour, so if you
| translate that into a local non-US cost does it still seem
| absurd? I may have misunderstood your point, but I don't think
| it is a good argument for why running a business fixing things
| using local labour should be a fantasy.
|
| Aside from that, in my view a world where a sofa costs less
| than one weeks wages is the absurd and unsustainable one. We've
| adopted an attitude of being incredibly entitled to cheap tat
| and that needs to stop.
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| 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
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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).
| rocqua wrote:
| 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.
| acdha wrote:
| > 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.
| HenriTEL wrote:
| Ikea already understood that there is a market for this
| kind of goods. They sell a few hardwood furnitures which
| are not crazy expensive.
| jll29 wrote:
| (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.
| jogjayr wrote:
| Ikea sofas can be underrated. My wife bought a Gronlid
| 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.
| card_zero wrote:
| Hmm, gron lid is Swedish for "green suffer!", message
| unclear.
| amarant wrote:
| Lid has more meanings though. It can also mean
| "inclination" or "hillside" (roughly) which makes more
| sense in the context. Gronlid 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.
| card_zero wrote:
| Yes, I may possibly have noticed that before commenting,
| cannot confirm or deny.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| I have an Ikea leather sofa which is still going strong
| after 10+ years.
| krab wrote:
| 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.
| PontifexMinimus wrote:
| > 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| wruza wrote:
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| wruza wrote:
| 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.
| moffkalast wrote:
| 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.
| switch007 wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| wazoox wrote:
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
| wazoox wrote:
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| > 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.
| marcinzm wrote:
| 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.
| rcpt wrote:
| Yeah but sounds like this guy has owned a house in Canada for
| the past 25 years
| xorax wrote:
| IKEA warranty most of its sofa 10 years now. But I doubt any
| other large furniture store will do the same.
| eloisant wrote:
| 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".
| crawfishphase wrote:
| you can also have the leather refinished instead of replacing it.
| they fill the cracks etc and touch up the "paint". I like this
| look more but ymmv depending what is available near you
| philjohn wrote:
| Also depends on the leather.
|
| If it's aniline, there's little they can do. That's also the
| nicest leather for a sofa (IMHO) as it breathes and so doesn't
| get uncomfortable to sit in when the weather is warm.
| moffkalast wrote:
| 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.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| This is like people complaining about how air travel sucks
| compared to the time you could get a rib roast carved in the
| aisle in the 1960s.
|
| Markets have determined that people prefer cheaper, shoddier
| sofas compared to expensive high quality sofas.
|
| If you don't believe that, then go into business as a high
| quality sofa factory.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| In the same way that markets have determined that people
| 'prefer' renting small mouldy damp apartments and eating
| noodles than buying penthouse apartments and eating at five
| star restaurants?
| baggy_trough wrote:
| No, not like that.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _If you don 't believe that, then go into business as a high
| quality sofa factory._
|
| You can't, because your competitors have well-staffed marketing
| departments that can convince people their shit sofas are
| actually quality, sell them significantly cheaper than you
| could sell yours. They have more experience at this, much wider
| reach than you or any other upstart. It's hard to compete on
| quality when dishonesty is legal.
| mokanfar wrote:
| Most of today's world furniture comes from -----. Most of the
| problems in the furniture market today deal with a trend that
| middle class try to imitate the rich interior design look and
| feel. The uneducated consumer is surrounded by a market -----
| created demand for which is furniture knockoffs of fashion
| furniture brands that you see in Interior Design Magazines.
|
| The furniture is built with poor materials, and dangerous
| chemicals treating finishes and frame construction. Almost all
| faux finishes (veneer, marble, concrete, leather, stone etc...)
| is made with really bad ingredients to give it the overall look
| and feel to the real texture they are trying to imitate.
|
| The fashion brand furniture keeps evolving as a fashion brand
| should even when it comes to furniture. Therefore, furniture is
| a trend market, where people can afford it. Where people can
| not afford it, they fill their space with the knockoff
| furniture, realize it is not good quality, accumulate enough
| money to repeat the cycle with another poorly manufactured
| replacement. This is what is driving most of the demand today
| to keep churning out low price-point furniture for the newly
| emerging middle working class of today's world that do not
| understand what really goes on behind the scenes of how their
| furniture gets made, or maybe they don't care.
|
| The other furniture market is for people who, as others
| commented, leave furniture pieces to their children. Those
| groups do not care about fashion, as with people that just need
| clothes to walk around not caring about the brand that they are
| advertising.
|
| There is still good affordable furniture out there. Hand-built
| with care and precision as a Rolls-Royce car would be in the
| factory, mostly small companies in Italy and other parts of the
| world still to this day make great long-lasting pieces. The
| locality of the furniture manufacturer matters on the price
| significantly. Shipping logistics for furniture is a nightmare.
| nakedneuron wrote:
| Quality (or the lack thereof) as a hidden property seems to be a
| man-made artifact. Are there any examples in nature (excluding
| mankind) coming up with this? Evolution doesn't seem to choose
| this path. Why do we?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Plummage and other external indicators of fitness, which
| animals use to game the mating game?
|
| Still, nature is first and foremost red in tooth and claw.
| Fighting for survival has a magical ability to cut through all
| the bullshit and reveal things for what they are. Quality won't
| stay hidden for long if it's directly relevant to you eating
| your next meal, instead of becoming one.
|
| Related, I believe this is why humanity seems to have made
| major leaps in science and technology during and after military
| conflicts. But the stakes matter. When people ordering and
| funding the research are really worried about losing, you get
| amazing pace of innovation. When they're not, you get amazing
| pace of fraud.
| waciki wrote:
| > this is why humanity seems to have made major leaps in
| science and technology during and after military conflicts
|
| Did it? I can't really find numbers on that.
| throwawayFinX wrote:
| I think it's broadly accepted that WW2 forced or
| accelerated inventions such as: jet planes, radios,
| synthetic rubber, radar, the Jeep, duct tape, nukes.
|
| The cold war -> the space race.
|
| Drone tech/military AI in Ukraine is perhaps a more recent
| example.
| nakedneuron wrote:
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| fire_lake wrote:
| Some animals pretend to be more dangerous than they are by
| mimicking colors etc.
| nakedneuron wrote:
| 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.
| card_zero wrote:
| 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
| nakedneuron wrote:
| I don't mind at all. Thanks for sharing, it looks like a
| very interesting read!
| card_zero wrote:
| r/K selection is about the tradeoff between quantity and
| quality.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory
| nakedneuron wrote:
| 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.
| card_zero wrote:
| 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.
| nakedneuron wrote:
| I don't see the connection to intentionally banking on
| lower quality across the board here.
| card_zero wrote:
| 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.
| nakedneuron wrote:
| Could you point to the example you mentioned, I couldn't
| find it.
| card_zero wrote:
| 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.
| nakedneuron wrote:
| 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.
| thrance wrote:
| It's weird how many people here will shout against any (assumed)
| critic of capitalism.
|
| "So you want to live in North Korea???". No, I don't. What I want
| is a system where we can get quality products that are not
| manufactured by slaves on the other side of the world, and that
| didn't require burning 3 bathtubs of gasoline. And our system
| definitely ain't it.
| immibis wrote:
| There are two types of countries observable in the world today:
| ones that are shit like capitalism, and ones that are shit like
| North Korea.
| thrance wrote:
| Good luck convincing the chinese worker that made your phone
| of the merits of capitalism.
| tristor wrote:
| 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.
| thrance wrote:
| 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...
| tristor wrote:
| 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.
| thrance wrote:
| 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.
| tristor wrote:
| > 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.
| thrance wrote:
| 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.
| animaomnium wrote:
| 3tubs x 40gal/tub x $3.50/gal = $420.
|
| Wow, you're spending $420 on shipping? How far away are they
| keeping those slaves?
| aboodman wrote:
| 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.
| thrance wrote:
| Might I introduce you to a concept called "hyperbole"?
| eloisant wrote:
| Shipping doesn't come by car, with gasoline bought at a US
| gas station.
| buffalobuffalo wrote:
| 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.
| thrance wrote:
| 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...
| buffalobuffalo wrote:
| 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.
| thrance wrote:
| 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.
| frugalmail wrote:
| 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.
| jll29 wrote:
| Of course from a venture capitalist's perspective, running a
| lifestyle business is the ultimate failure: not only don't they
| get their investment back with a nice 40x return, but also they
| cannot write off the investment as a loss as long as the business
| keeps going.
|
| This is not a judgment about lifestlye businesses per se, it's
| just not a match for risk capital regarding funding.
| agomez314 wrote:
| 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.
| Micoloth wrote:
| Every time I read takes like this I think people forget why big
| brands exist?
|
| Small business (or "lifestyle business") vs big brand is often
| framed about being high quality vs cheap price, because in
| practice it often is. But _in theory_ the two things are
| completely unrelated.
|
| Yes fixing stuff is good for the planet. But big brands could
| offer customer service just fine if people wanted it.
|
| Small business vs big brand is a problem of _predictability_. If
| you have many independent small businesses, NOT all of them will
| be good. It will be a mixed bag what you get in your area. OP has
| felt so fortunate with his local highly-skilled asian-owned small
| business that he felt compelled to write about it on the
| internet. Not everyone will be this lucky.
|
| And in a world where information travels very fast (this is
| really the key point) this system is unsustainable, as there are
| really only 2 options: either people accept the fact that some
| neighbourhoods are served worse than others, or the take the car
| and make the travel up to the nice asian shop they read about on
| the internet, because that's apparently worth it.
|
| But, surprise, this second option doesn't scale. Because as soon
| as the nice asian shop goes viral, they realise they can't keep
| up with the demand at all. And so they will probably refuse lots
| of customers. (Note, I'm not even considering the option they
| might increase prices)
|
| In this sense, the derogatory "lifestyle business" comment makes
| sense, since I think it's meant to highlight how elitist it is.
| It doesn't scale in the sense that it creates a race for who is
| able to cop the best option. When I need a sofa, I want to be
| able to "just" get a sofa. Simple and predictable. If the sofa is
| good quality, even better.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _When I need a sofa, I want to be able to "just" get a sofa.
| Simple and predictable. If the sofa is good quality, even
| better._
|
| So, how often do you eat at McDo?
|
| (whose entire value proposition is "just" get some calories,
| simply and predictably)
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _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.
| bitnasty wrote:
| I think the point is that McDonald's is literally all over
| the world, but that doesn't mean the food is consistent.
| brewdad wrote:
| McDonalds may have the most consistent food product in
| the world.
| toast0 wrote:
| 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.
| ric2b wrote:
| 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.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| 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.
| benrutter wrote:
| 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.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| 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.
| wrs wrote:
| 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.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| 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.
| beowulfey wrote:
| 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.
| photon_lines wrote:
| '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.
| borski wrote:
| 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.
| photon_lines wrote:
| 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.
| jprete wrote:
| 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.
| borski wrote:
| 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.
| brewdad wrote:
| 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.
| hansvm wrote:
| 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?
| wanderingstan wrote:
| 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.
| hansvm wrote:
| 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?
| fragmede wrote:
| Hero pill dispenser is currently pulling this play.
| They're pairing a monthly service fee with a device that
| doesn't need one.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > 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.
| hansvm wrote:
| 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."
| drrotmos wrote:
| > 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.
| brewdad wrote:
| 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.
| pokerface_86 wrote:
| you can buy high foam density replacement cushions for
| relatively cheap online if you want to replace them
| timbray wrote:
| A high-quality leather sofa these days is closer to $15K
| than $1500, ouch.
| financypants wrote:
| 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.
| photon_lines wrote:
| 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.
| kmoser wrote:
| > 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.)
| GeneralMaximus wrote:
| > ... 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?
| setgree wrote:
| 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.
| brewdad wrote:
| 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.
| izacus wrote:
| 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?
| abhayhegde wrote:
| > 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.
| alerighi wrote:
| > 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.)
| wholinator2 wrote:
| 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
| brewdad wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| II2II wrote:
| 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).
| m463 wrote:
| 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.
| shellfishgene wrote:
| 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.
| m463 wrote:
| I wonder if they're a specific outlier. Remember they
| didn't want to sell their jackets to wall street folks.
| Arn_Thor wrote:
| 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)
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| >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.
| Spivak wrote:
| 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.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Where do the friends and loved ones come from?
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _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)
| shnock wrote:
| To which places are you referring?
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Curious minds want to know of where you speak...
| selimthegrim wrote:
| If it's where I think, my brother already lives there but the
| immigration process is formidable.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| (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.)
| po wrote:
| > How would we get there from here? I'm not smart enough to
| figure out what the regulatory regime is that would ban most of
| what private-equity does and tilt the playing field in favor of
| resilient lifestyle businesses.
|
| One good way is to pay attention to the details, learn how things
| are made (YouTube helps with this!) and not be impressed by
| shitty work, in general. I buy plenty of MDF-built products but I
| also know the difference. There are just so many people who have
| no idea.
| abhayhegde wrote:
| That is a good point. I would also think that buyers must vote
| with their money. Stop buying cheaply made products as much as
| possible, when an alternative slightly-expensive yet well made
| things exist. Of course, easier said than done, especially when
| money is a constraint.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| I call it the "billion dollars or bust" mentality. The attitude
| that a <1% chance of making it really big outweights a near 100%
| chance of a comfortably profitable business for yourself and a
| modest number of others.
| azubinski wrote:
| Well, it started with:
|
| "So we had them replaced, at a fair price, by a small local
| business. Which is something that modern capitalism is trying to
| make impossible"
|
| And then there was lot of blah-blah-blah about small local
| business which thanks to those "modern capitalism" is possible
| and exists. But what is "fair price" is still unknown from whose
| point of view it is fair.
|
| So, let use the same style (it is the style, yeah):
|
| If you want to rise popularity of your blog in many modern
| capitalism countries, always start any blog record with any form
| of modern capitalism blaming :)
| mariusor wrote:
| > If you want to rise popularity of your blog in many modern
| capitalism countries, always start any blog record with any
| form of modern capitalism blaming
|
| As this forum is mostly populated with techies, one would hope
| Tim Bray is a known name which doesn't need increasing his
| blog's popularity, or being suspect of pulling such stunts. :)
| karolist wrote:
| It boils down to giving people freedom but the world is being
| destroyed or communism (it has its own problems).
| dangus wrote:
| 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).
| vhodges wrote:
| I am so glad Tim (and thus Luxcious) are in the Lower Mainland. I
| don't need them currently, but it's nice to know it's an option.
| parpfish wrote:
| I always thought "lifestyle business" meant something else.
|
| In this article it means "small business that supports the
| lifestyle of its owner/employees"
|
| I _thought_ it meant that it was a business that provided a non-
| essential usually-trendy "lifestyle goods /accessories" for its
| customers.
| Joeboy wrote:
| I thought the "lifestyle business" negativity was chiefly
| around trendy businesses that are only viable due to being
| covertly subsidized, eg. by family money.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| 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).
| tenkabuto wrote:
| Ooh, the term is indeed used differently depending on what it's
| being discussed in relation to: as in the article, the
| business's structure itself and its relation to its owner's
| hopes/expectations for it; or as you pointed to, the
| industry/market/product or service category of the business's
| product or service.
| jannyfer wrote:
| Same here, but maybe I was thinking of "lifestyle brand" and
| I'd never actually heard "lifestyle business".
| snowwrestler wrote:
| This article is misusing the term. Every business supports the
| lifestyle of its employees, by providing them with money and
| (sometimes) benefits. But that doesn't mean every business is a
| "lifestyle business."
|
| What makes a "lifestyle business" is that the owner picks the
| lifestyle they want first, then designs a business around that.
| For example someone who wants to go rock climbing all the time
| is not going to consider a furniture repair shop in a big city
| to be a "lifestyle business." Probably few people would
| consider furniture repair to be a lifestyle business, unless
| your preferred lifestyle is to do manual labor in a crappy
| warehouse every day with few vacations.
|
| Lifestyle businesses usually take one of a few shapes:
|
| - Monetizing the lifestyle directly: for example Instagram
| influencers who make a business out of their personal travel,
| fashion, outdoor adventure, etc.
|
| - Running a high-leverage business at a low intensity: for
| example a highly automated SaaS business that is kept small and
| easy to run, so the owner can spend most of their time doing
| other things. This is usually what VCs look down on, because
| they seek out high leverage business models and consider
| anything less than max intensity to be a wasted opportunity.
|
| - Optional businesses: for example low-intensity "consulting"
| gigs that independently wealthy people operate to keep from
| being bored, or for tax advantage.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _This kind of transaction is exactly what modern capitalism is
| trying to stamp out._
|
| The author is attributing intentionality to something that has no
| free will or even sentience.
|
| Capitalism and the market economy are simply people who owns
| things and who make decisions to buy things.
|
| People need/want a certain item, value it to a certain extent,
| and are willing to part with some number of dollars to receive
| that value. If a large number of people do not highly value an
| item (e.g., sofas), then they will not be willing to allocate a
| large number of dollars towards it, so companies that charge a
| high dollar amount will not be able to collect them. If you are
| 'forcing' such companies to exist, then they have to be able to
| collect monies to not go bankrupt, which basically means you are
| forcing these high(er) prices onto the public. If the individuals
| who make up the public are not interested in these high(er)-cost
| items why should they be forced to pay the money to buy them
| instead of allocating their dollars to something they do value?
|
| (Of course the prices need to reflect all the costs associated
| with making them, which is where things like (e.g.) carbon
| pricing comes in for the environment.)
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _The author is attributing intentionality to something that
| has no free will or even sentience. Capitalism and the market
| economy are simply people who owns things and who make
| decisions to buy things._
|
| In the same sense the human brain has no intentionality or
| sentience - it's simply neurons wired together, trading
| chemicals and jolting each other for shits and giggles.
|
| Sometimes a high-level process works in a way not obvious from
| looking at individual parts, or even dependent on them. See
| also: corporations are effectively alien minds, AIs executing
| on top of a runtime made of humans.
|
| > _People need /want a certain item, value it to a certain
| extent, and are willing to part with some number of dollars to
| receive that value. If a large number of people do not highly
| value an item (...)_
|
| That breaks down in practice, because people have finite time
| and energy to evaluate and make choices, while sellers have a
| lot of leeway in plain lying to their customers. As a result,
| people mostly chose out of what's available, and quietly endure
| it being shit.
| jprete wrote:
| There's value in identifying what the incentive structure is
| doing even if it can only be expressed in anthropomorphic
| terms.
| blfr wrote:
| > This kind of transaction is exactly what modern capitalism is
| trying to stamp out.
|
| Yet again modern capitalism is blamed for its users' lack of
| taste: people _genuinely prefer_ new, crappier stuff to classier,
| old items. This is the same with Tik Tok algos, tailors being
| unpopular compared to fast fashion and even overpriced luxury
| brands, fast food vs cooking, etc.
|
| Virtually every time a consumer is confronted with a lousier but
| easily available option and a vastly superior one but requiring
| some mental, or occasionally physical, effort, they choose the
| former.
|
| Capitalism merely holds up a mirror to our preferences. As it
| turns out, we really don't like it.
| ajkjk wrote:
| > people genuinely prefer new, crappier stuff to classier, old
| items
|
| > Virtually every time a consumer is confronted with a lousier
| but easily available option and a vastly superior one but
| requiring some mental, or occasionally physical, effort, they
| choose the former.
|
| No they don't. There's a bunch of information asymmetries and
| missing choices that make the equilibrium warped and bizarre,
| rather than revealing anything so simple about society. Sure
| it's at some local optimum but there can be still be wildly
| better global optima that the system has trouble reaching.
| blfr wrote:
| > 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.
| istultus wrote:
| Let me posit an ad-hoc theory built on our anchoring bias in
| regards to price and our inability to think in terms of
| inflation/hyperbolic discounting:
|
| tl;dr - Once a cheap alternative is on the market, us frugal
| folks can't imagine paying for what was once the default and only
| option, distorting our understanding of what constitutes good
| quality
|
| * He says buying a new sofa of the same quality today would cost
| upwards of $5000, and he paid more than $3000 for it in 1999. He
| paid $1000 now to reupholster.
|
| * Using US inflation data which is easier to access, $3000 in '99
| is around $5600 today - so practically unchanged.
|
| * What's changed? Since the emergence of cheap badly-built
| furniture, it now _feels_ profligate to spend $5000 on a sofa,
| when in 1999 it was (hypothetically) the only option.
|
| * Instead people feel better buying a (say) $800 IKEA sofa every
| 5 years, which over 25 years is the $4000 nominal he has spent on
| his own sofa. It _feels_ much less painful to give IKEA $800 now
| than to give your local artisan sofa maker $5000. Who profits
| from that? _You_ moreso than the local artisan.
|
| * It's true that the middle has been hollowed out - I can't find
| a well-made $1500 sofa, but on the plus side the less affluent
| have access to cheap sofas, and the affluent but frugal whinge
| and buy a new sofa every few years.
|
| I'm squarely in the frugal bracket, if not affluent...
| rcpt wrote:
| The Ikea sofa makes a lot of sense if you don't think you'll
| stay in the same place for very long.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
| atopal wrote:
| 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-...
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.)
| tanepiper wrote:
| 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)
| ric2b wrote:
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
| pards wrote:
| 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
| Anon1096 wrote:
| 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.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| 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.
| seer wrote:
| 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.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| 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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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.
| petesergeant wrote:
| 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
| switch007 wrote:
| 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
| frugalmail wrote:
| This sounds antagonistic and ungrateful. But capitalism offered
| affordable furniture that got me off the floor with pillows which
| many places around the world still do. And oh look, if you want
| that kind of furniture that has joinery, and 8 way tied coils,
| you buy it too, paying what the level of effort is worth which
| would probably be mid 5 figures instead of the low 4, or high 3.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Folks, not everything is "late stage capitalism." Furniture
| repair has been the domain of small businesses forever. And they
| are in crappy little out of the way places because that's where
| real estate is cheap, and they don't need foot traffic. Customers
| come find them when they need furniture repaired.
|
| Furniture repair is also not a "lifestyle business." That phrase
| is not a synonym for small business. Furniture repair is hard
| work and low margin. Customers are intermittent so it's hard to
| take time off (because you risk losing a significant project).
|
| A lifestyle business is a business that people set up who are
| trying to fund their preferred lifestyle. For example, a single
| person SaaS that creates monthly passive income, like half the
| people here on HN are trying to set up.
|
| I worked for a lifestyle business: the owner was an entrepreneur
| with 2 successful exits and did not need to work. But he had set
| up a tech consultancy so he could work on a few interesting
| projects a year and funnel all his favorite expenses (new tech
| gadgets, cars, travel, etc) through a tax-advantaged business
| entity.
|
| He picked his lifestyle and then built the business around that.
| Most small businesses are the other way around: the owner has to
| adapt their lifestyle to the business, in order to stay in
| business.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I don't fundamentally disagree with what you've written here,
| but the reality is that we don't have any idea from TFA just
| what sort of situation Luxcious is actually in.
|
| They may be a "just getting by" furniture repair shop, or they
| may make easily as much as the owners want it to, and in the
| meantime provides work that they and their employees (if there
| are any other than the owners) find interesting and/or
| rewarding.
|
| This exists too (even if it may indeed not be the norm).
| amelius wrote:
| This equally applies to beds and mattresses and kitchens and
| probably a lot of other furniture-related stuff too.
| drewda wrote:
| For a post that's about supporting businesses that provide value,
| it's unfortunate to see a link to bypass a magazine's paywall.
|
| (Yes, I'm annoyed when I want to read an interestingly headlined
| article that first requires a subscription. Yes, I also use
| archive.is to get around some outlets' paywalls. That said, I do
| try to pay for the online newspapers and magazines that I read
| the most, and I think it's worth nudging others in that direction
| as well.)
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| Most businesses in the USA are "lifestyle" businesses, and they
| are the backbone of our economy. Everywhere I've worked, we had
| relationships with dozens of them, and the area around us was
| full of them. We couldn't have succeeded without that ecosystem.
| Most people who didn't work in the relevant industries didn't
| even know they were there.
| lkrubner wrote:
| "This kind of transaction is exactly what modern capitalism is
| trying to stamp out."
|
| Since small businesses lack "economies of scale" they need fat
| gross margins to survive. In the USA, both the public and the
| political leadership was frightened of the slow buildup of
| inflation from 1960 to 1973, and then the explosion of inflation,
| into double digit territory, for much of the period from 1973 to
| 1982. After that experience we had a long era, a whole generation
| of leadership, where the public and the leadership felt the fight
| against inflation had to be one of the most important economic
| fights that the government engaged in. And the fight against
| inflation had to involve the fight against gross margins. So we,
| as a society, went to war against small businesses, because small
| businesses survive on the kind of margins that were seen as
| causing inflation. By contrast, allowing the spread of companies
| such as WalMart, which benefits from "economies of scale" and so
| can survive on razor-thin gross margins, was seen as helping to
| stop inflation. Likewise, opening up the economy to nations such
| as China was seen as an important step to limit inflation. The
| cost structure in China was such that a company in China could
| have fat gross margins and yet still underprice a company in the
| USA that had thin gross margins. Thus importing from China became
| an important part of the war against inflation.
|
| All of this worked for awhile. The era from 1982 to 2008 was
| known as The Great Moderation, an era when inflation fell and the
| business cycle moderated. And the era after 2008 also saw rock
| bottom inflation -- inflation remained under the Fed's 2% target
| for several years after 2008.
|
| Under President Trump, the USA began to adapt a new economic
| policy, and President Biden has continued forward with the Trump
| policies. The new era has seen increasing tariffs on China and a
| willingness to rethink some aspects of the open trade policies
| that we followed for most of 50 years. And since 2000, starting
| under Trump and then continuing under Biden, we have seen several
| trillion worth of stimulus spending. This has revived inflation,
| but it has also allowed many small businesses to raise prices and
| thus re-attain the kinds of gross margins they need to survive.
|
| In general, a society can have the lowest possible prices, or it
| can have prices that are high enough to support small businesses,
| but it cannot have both. Since America is a large, diverse nation
| we will never have agreement about what our priorities should be,
| but we should keep in mind, we did some real damage to ourselves
| during the decades that we eliminated inflation and we are
| gifting ourselves some real benefits during this current era of
| inflation.
| nakedneuron wrote:
| Has anybody made the same observation? :
|
| Philosophy seems to be concerned with furniture a lot. I'm
| compiling a list of examples I encountered where in a
| philosophical (sometimes not philosophical) context someone
| brings up the table (rarer so the chair) as an instance of a
| physical thing. I started compiling this list when I was
| convinced this _is_ a thing.
|
| Further examples (book citations, links) greatly encouraged if
| you can contribute. My list is still small but only because I was
| so late to take action.
|
| I have an idea of why this is. But I want to corroborate my
| empiric base before going to the greater public with this.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _I have an idea of why this is._
|
| Because they are convenient examples of things everybody in
| their audience has seen and knows about, and are quite simple
| too?
|
| One could use dogs for example, to make somebody understand the
| Platonic Ideas (in this case, dogness), but they have a lot
| more aspects and variables than tables (even questions about
| unique personality and soul might creep in, whereas for tables
| it wont).
| nakedneuron wrote:
| While this is true, there are billions of convenient examples
| everybody knows. Also there are things that have a lot less
| variables than a table.
|
| I'm not convinced. (I don't thing so.)
| lovemenot wrote:
| I will bite. How do these multi-thousand-year furniture
| lobbyists continue to conspire to successfully frame our
| contemporary ideas toward their agenda?
| nakedneuron wrote:
| 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.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _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).
| nakedneuron wrote:
| 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.
| reliablereason wrote:
| 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).
| meristohm wrote:
| 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...
| codexb wrote:
| Wait, if other cultures don't use sofas, what do they sit on?
| Are their houses all full of single chairs?
| salomonk_mur wrote:
| In the floor or a mat.
| ghaff wrote:
| Or wood stools/benches/chairs. Fabric was very expensive
| until relatively recently. A modern sofa would presumably
| have been an extreme luxury item not that long ago in
| historical terms.
| timbray wrote:
| You're right, but I didn't realize that till later. Except for
| the original "Parable of the Sower" was from Jesus not Olivia.
| But I also thought of Olivia's first.
| unscaled wrote:
| 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
| j45 wrote:
| Lifestyle business is often sent out as a slur, often originating
| from someone who has said lifestyle from being wealthy.
|
| Traditional VC investment by its definition is trying to hedge
| it's returns by investing in the time of startup founders, and
| often only large bets make the return worth while.
|
| Increasingly, I agree with the idea to call a business "self-
| funded", because that's what it actually is, instead of
| bootstrapped or lifestyle.
|
| I would say it might not be a stretch that what every founder is
| doing is to make an improvement in the lifestyle of their team
| and clients. VC investment is a good vehicle when entered into
| mindfully, and also drastically changes your course.
| _nalply wrote:
| It's about incentives.
|
| One example: What if companies rented sofas instead of selling
| them? Perhaps a weird idea, but humour me. The incentives would
| shift. Companies would be more interested to give you durable
| sofas. Because there will be less profit if they have to replace
| sofas more often.
| ghaff wrote:
| There are furniture rental places. They rent pretty much the
| cheapest crap they can get their hands on.
| jacobn wrote:
| A very big reason for the "go big or go home" mentality comes
| from very simple company valuation metrics:
|
| If you have $10M ARR and modest growth you're probably going to
| get a ~4x P/E valuation.
|
| If you have $100M ARR and modest growth you can go public and get
| a ~20x P/E valuation.
|
| So you're not only 10x more valuable, you're 50x more valuable.
|
| Basically you get a massive multiplier boost on top of the
| increased scale.
|
| (Rough & approximate, YMMV, etc)
| losvedir wrote:
| 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.
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