There's a disconnect when I look at the price of good furniture compared to products that are insanely more complicated (laptops, smartphones), heavier than furniture (motorbikes, snowblowers, lawnmowers), as bulky as flatpack bookcases (big screen TVs), and need to be shipped even greater distances than furniture (all my examples would be coming to the U.S. from Asia).
Furthermore, furniture has much less regulation than electronics and motorized things (so it should be cheaper), furniture needs much less capital (a new TV manufacturing facility would cost hundreds of millions of dollars), and designing a new piece of furniture needs a tiny fraction of the engineers and programmers that any new laptop, TV, or smartphone would require.
I think that good furniture in general is still grossly expensive and I don't understand where the money is going.
EDIT: I have an example: I have a Sharp 60-inch TV, bought in 2011 for $1319.99, and weighs 92.6 pounds or 42 kg according to the spec sheet. I also have a dining room table bought the same year for ~$1200 and which weighs less than the TV. Considering that the TV is literally a million times more complicated than the table and that the raw materials of the TV (sand->silicon->ICs, petroleum->plastics) have undergone vastly greater transformation than a table (wood, glue, iron->nails), why isn't the TV much more expensive or the table much cheaper? Both are commodities and both are made on assembly lines.
Pretty much all the answers below you are wrong :)
The real reason is simply that nobody wants it.
The machinery/etc exists to make it completely trivial to productionize semi-custom and completely custom furniture, out of high quality wood.
From 5-axis CNC to multi-angle boring machines to what have you.
Heck, with the copy of alphacam i have, i could program pretty much most of a factory.
(and it doesn't need to acclimate, it's kiln dried. You just keep your factory at the same humidity as the climate it's going to. Even then, most of the issues you hit are around finishing and solvable).
Your biggest underlying problem, again, contrary to the comments, is actually that real high quality lumber is not a sheet good.
For for tops/etc, you have to spend the machining time to make it one (IE automatically plane/cut/join, then machine).
Sure.
Let's look at some of the major pieces of furniture people have:
Tables, cabinets, chairs.
It's the same story with all of them.
Let's start with cabinets. A bit of cheating since most people don't consider it furniture, but worth talking about.
Most people want white or colored cabinets. The "natural wood" look is mostly out of style these days, due to mass over-production of red-oak cabinets (and thank god. they made them because red oak was the cheapest most available hardwood in the us for many many years)
Where it isn't, they want something that "looks" like cherry (or what they think cherry looks like), or mahogany but isn't.
People are more than happy to buy cabinets with thin veneers or laminated whatever on them. They have no concept of construction quality, etc. They don't care. People who do care are willing to pay, but even then, don't know what they are paying for.
Given that, what precisely supports the price differential of making "really good" for people who don't care and aren't willing to pay for it?
The answer is "nothing" :)
Thus, it's not cost effective to make cabinets out cherry, when coloring poplar reddish will do.
It's also usually not cost effective to use real wood for anything that is going to be topcoated a solid color.
But again, you have this issue that there is a high-end, and a low-end, and the middle end doesn't exist, really, it's just low-end stuff sold at a higher price. Because they can.
It's pretty much all mass produced, BTW.
Note: The last part to be automated is finishing, and as the cost of flat-line finishing machines comes down from 100k to 10k, the number of shops buying them goes up, as happened with regular CNC.
But even in finishes, people can't tell what they are paying for. In an ideal world, you want your cabinets done with a nice 2k post-catalyzed conversion varnish (US) or 2k urethane (europe). Or uv-cured stuff that is equivalent. They will be very highly scratch resistant, highly moisture and chemical resistant, etc.
Can a consumer tell? No. They will look identical at the start. Unless you rubbed acetone on them, you are unlikely to be able to tell if the finish is a post-cat or not from the finished product. You would have to place 3-4 years wear and tear on them, and see how scratched and stained they look.
So instead, a ton of non-factory cabinet makers still use pretty crappy finishes (pre-cat lacquers, etc) because they are cheap and fast. 2k stuff requires accurate mixing and has a pot-life. Good folks these days use cyclomix or equivalent, or uv cure, or something, to make up for this. But the main sales point is lack of callbacks, which is hard to quantify. This kind of quality is hard to sell. Nobody (well, not enough people) really look at their cabinets n years later and says "hey, i bet that guy didn't do a great finishing job", instead they say "gee, i guess i'm hard on cabinets".
Interestingly, plenty of commercial work will call you on this kind of thing happening. But consumers just suck it up.
That's cabinets. Let's say that's a special case for a second.
Tables.
Well, okay, so to start, people do buy mass produced really-good stuff already. IIRC, most of the furniture restoration hardware sells is mass-produced.
I've also seen really well-made mass-produced stuff at crate and barrel before (in fact, in one case, better than i could make it by far, and i've been woodworking for 20+ years)
But most people are not willing to pay for this stuff, and those who do, are willing to buy cheaply made stuff for higher prices.
Top is solid wood, pretty simple and machined construction.
You could produce it really cheaply with machines (and i'm sure they do)
But people are willing to pay 1499, and if i make the same thing, with a veneer top and same glued-on live edge (IE not "really-good"), and sell it for half price, people will buy it.
So why would i make it "really good" for 799 when i can make it "really crappy" for 799 and people buy it?
and that's precisely what happens!
Chairs are the same.
In general, people care what things look like, not how they are made or what they are made of.
So most people aren't willing to pay for quality, even if you tried to educate them about what it looked like (if you have to educate your market that you are better, you are probably going to lose)
This makes it not cost-effective to try to optimize for quality.
Somebody will just out-sell you and out-profit you by making it crappily and selling it for 80% of the same price.
This is in fact, the history of the world here. The good stuff either got pushed to the high end, or out-sold/out-stripped by people making crappy stuff and selling it at the middle end, and then making super-crappy stuff and selling it at the low-end.
In any of these markets, there isn't room in the market for this linear-curve of quality vs pricing. If quality vs price was a 10 point scale, it'd look like this right now:
quality: 1-3
price: 1-6
quality: 4-9
price: 7-8
quality: 10
price: 9-10
As a result, quality 4-9 doesn't get done much, and it makes no sense to make quality 10 furniture and sell it at price 2.
Strong agreement. For specific examples, read the history of Stanley Tools or Craftsman. Compare that to the rise of Harbor Freight and the stories the old timers will tell you about Taiwanese tools from about 1975.
My only argument -- real CNC is still north of 100k, it just happens to be worth running because of the production speed increases. The reason you don't CNC furniture like IKEA is that you get more production in less time by using custom built machines that produce specific sizes and shapes in volume. The real reason that IKEA employs the number of engineers it does is so that they can optimize production -- reuse this shape or this part in eleven designs instead of ten and you save the company two machines valued at $X million and you save Y meters of production facility floor space valued at $Z/m^2.
This is a great real-world example of the Nobel Prize winning concept, The Market for Lemons. [0]
A buyer wants to spend somewhere between price 4-6, but they aren't able to tell quality 3 from quality 7. Due to fear of getting taken advantage of, they end up settling for low quality at low price. Sellers react to this behavior, and we get the price/quality distortions described above.
This quality/price curve you describe seems to come about naturally now in our world of mass-produced things. Cameras, Furniture, housing construction, appliances, cars, etc. It's straightforward to find 'crappy', and 'nicer crappy', it's reasonable to find 'truly premium', and it's very difficult to find 'solid, but not quite premium'.
There is definitely a hollowing out of the middle ground, and I think you are correct in that much of it comes from a lack of informed customer base. Only a fleeting few are willing to educate themselves to recognize the difference between 'nicer crappy' and 'solid' even if in a well-informed market they should be about the same price.
Thanks for your writeup, I'm really getting sick of the cheap stuff that is out there. IKEA has served it's purpose for me, and to be honest a bunch of pieces have survived multiple moves but they are now usually stuck in closets or in my kid's rooms.
Anyway I'm rambling on because I'm curious if there are any decent places to buy furniture nowadays, a good table for instance? I feel like when I got dragged around looking for a dining room table to Ashley's and Bob's and whatever other chain store they are all selling the same crap, just at slightly different prices. I'm honestly thinking I would rather build my own table than buy something made out of particle board with laminate on it.
I has similar experiences with Ashley and Bobs. The Farmhouse Store is decent. They ship their orders out to Amish country (or so they say), which is also a good resource. But its solid wood and some hint of craftsmanship. (I've heard Restoration Hardware also, but can't confirm directly.)
I've been through a house fire and needed to replace furniture in most rooms over the past year or so. What I've learned is to pick and choose for quality. Family dining table to last until we move out of the house, where we're going to congregate daily for laughs, tears, homework, meals, holidays? High-quality for this family. Bookcase? Kids furniture? Cheaper the better (Sauder, Ikea) and anchor them to the wall - they're going to get beat up and are potential safety issues.
(edit) Oh, Estate Sales might be the only way to get out of that scale that Danny Bee is speaking of. Get some old furniture, and tweak it to your style (assuming thats enjoyable work to you). Just dont assume if it was made in 1960 there won't be some laminated wood veneer.
Buy vintage from Craigslist, AptDeco, estate sales, etc. The stuff that's lasted is usually of good quality, and even high-end/designer vintage that will last a lifetime can cost less than buying new cheaply made furniture from chain stores.
The only exceptions for me are couches (nobody figured out how to make a comfortable couch until c.1980) and mattresses.
Wood is remarkably expensive. Especially cabinet-grade wood that's free from knots. Even more so if you want sustainable hardwood. I've costed up doing my own furniture and it's far more expensive than IKEA even if you count your own labour as free.
It's the economy of scale; complexity is mostly a one time upfront cost. Once you've figured out how to efficiently make a hundred TVs at a time, you know how to make a million.
For a TV most of the materials and components are either plastic (and thus light and cheap) or generic silica based stuff that is produced in batches of millions at a time (electronic components) in the blink of an eye. The most expensive parts of a TV are probably its screen (complexity) and the copper wiring (cost of material).
With a wood table the production of all parts takes much more labour, and high quality wood furniture is usually made of parts that have exact measurements and specifications for that particular model of table. Wood is also a live material; no two pieces are alike (this holds true from the unprocessed logs to the finished table legs). Lumber also needs time to acclimatize, so the whole resources to product cycle takes a lot longer (increasing storage costs).
Also, unless you are Ikea, a globally operating corporation can sell a lot more TVs than dining tables.
"With a wood table the production of all parts takes much more labour"
No, they don't.
Really.
This is a pretty trivial application of CNC.
I CNC table legs on my simple one, and have designed much larger CNC automations for local shops that CNC them.
The people who are doing it at factory scale would find this utterly trivial.
" and high quality wood furniture is usually made of parts that have exact measurements and specifications for that particular model of table."
This doesn't mean anything to the robots.
Really.
They just don't care.
They are already automatically referencing and aligning things to get them square.
They use lasers or other sensors plus vacuum to automatically align it to alignment pins within 0.001".
Just not a big deal.
"Wood is also a live material; no two pieces are alike (this holds true from the unprocessed logs to the finished table legs)."
Again, sorry. I pay my supplier for 90% red cherry. I could pay him for 100% red cherry.
If you think i can't make a computer grain match stuff, etc, i don't know what to tell you. more automated cnc cabinet shops do it all day long.
" Lumber also needs time to acclimatize, so the whole resources to product cycle takes a lot longer (increasing storage costs)."
No, it doesn't, it's kiln dried, and the only thing that matters is the climate it's going to.
For what is being done to it (making a table), it doesn't matter since the top will be floating anyway.
"Also, unless you are Ikea, a globally operating corporation can sell a lot more TVs than dining tables.
"
This is literally the only reason: People don't want it compared to the ikea furniture. They don't care, and aren't or can't pay a premium.
Lots of global companies make TVs (LG, Samsung, Philips, Toshiba, Panasonic, Sharp, Sony, ...) but it seems that "there are no real Ikea competitors in the world, period."[1]
So why aren't there more globally operating corporations selling furniture?
Could there be an opportunity for a higher-end (better than Ikea) highly-automated global furniture maker to take away market from thousands of small local furniture makers all over the world?
Perhaps a combination of much more variation in both models and regional tastes. TVs get replaced a lot faster than good quality dining tables too. Come to think of it, there really isn't that much of a variety in choice of TVs (a few sizes, perhaps a curved screen or not) compared to dining tables — the latter are much more personal in taste.
hell the manual production requirements are pretty much shown to be a non issue in the linked article. making a book shelf is little different from a table and a set of machines could just churn them out.
the difference is variety. variety means no single product is a very large seller which can defeat economies of scale. the bookshelf in the article is generic and can be done on the cheap. Other furniture items tend to have more variety
It's just scale. Only a really really good designer can make furniture good enough to look and function better than mass produced. It takes time and their production runs are typically limited to at most double digits a year. These people will not work for a pittance and being intelligent and motivated would move on to other work if they can't earn well. All this conspires to make a market where few people are good enough, can earn enough and find the few clients that can afford it.
I love my billy shelves. I also have a dining table that cost 4 figures that I'll have for life and is unlikely to be seen in another house so it lends my home a personal touch. Which humans like :)
You chose to pay that much for the table. There are cheaper tables. You can get one for less than $100 if you want. But those probably don't meet your standards, and this one does.
Similarly, there are TVs that are much more expensive, but you decided to go for this one.
Wait until you see art... There is no regulation, it comes with probably no return policy. It requires one person to do -- art doesn't need capital to start at all. Yet art is insanely expensive. Do you rather be a programmer, an engineer, a fashion designer, a woodworker, or an artist? I don't have a good answer for your question, but I think the idea here is everyone needs a living.
Also, you don't need to purchase a new bookcase every year like you do with, say, your smartphone.
That's not true. There are a billion people putting their art on the Internet every day: DeviantArt, Pinterest, Flickr, Shutterfly, and other sites with fan fiction, manuscripts of books, cartoons, millions of homemade videos, music sites. The average price of all of this art is zero. Only a very tiny fraction of people make money with art.
First, saying art is cheap because billions pieces of art on Deviant Art are free is like saying code is cheap because billions of lines of code published every day on GitHub are free. Average you pay for code is zero, by that logic?
Second, the Internet can only host a very specific kind of art (digitalized) that is a very tiny fraction of art that you can experience in a museum or an exhibition. Where is my paint oil on canvas with the beautiful texture and smell I could experience on DeviantArt?
You have to count what you have to pay for an artist/coder to make what you want, not what they want. Then we are talking about the same thing.
There's a lot of terrible stuff on DeviantArt. But there's also a lot of great stuff on there too I've seen.
And then there's the stuff that combines both; beautifully rendered, highly detailed work that tells an interesting story in one image, that's also ultimately "just" fan-art for Rick and Morty. Humans are weird sometimes.
I don't think so... I think we are being spoiled by the vast amounts of. I am one of the generations who had formative experiences before internet, and I would have been completely transfixed by the stuff on say, deviantart. I could look at weird stuff in the library for hours sometimes, and half of that was not very good at all.
You'd be surprised how cheaply art students at your local college would be willing to recreate pieces for you. These people are already quite skilled by their 20s and it's no problem for them to make a copy of a piece. Their original pieces made for class can be found for next-to-nothing.
Second-hand shops are full of wonderful pieces for cheap.
Photographs and digital art are extremely cheap to print and frame. My local UPS store will do huge prints for a few bucks.
Mass produced art, like that from Ikea, is usually less than $40 a piece, a lot of it is less than $10. Homegoods and Hobby Lobby is another good place to shop for cheap mass-produced pieces.
You can do-it-yourself for the costs of materials. You don't need much skill to toss some colors onto a canvas.
Art can be cheap and it can be found everywhere. It doesn't need to be some hand-painted master piece. A printed picture or photograph in a frame will work just fine. Or a simple vase with some flowers.
Furthermore, furniture has much less regulation than electronics and motorized things (so it should be cheaper), furniture needs much less capital (a new TV manufacturing facility would cost hundreds of millions of dollars), and designing a new piece of furniture needs a tiny fraction of the engineers and programmers that any new laptop, TV, or smartphone would require.
I think that good furniture in general is still grossly expensive and I don't understand where the money is going.
EDIT: I have an example: I have a Sharp 60-inch TV, bought in 2011 for $1319.99, and weighs 92.6 pounds or 42 kg according to the spec sheet. I also have a dining room table bought the same year for ~$1200 and which weighs less than the TV. Considering that the TV is literally a million times more complicated than the table and that the raw materials of the TV (sand->silicon->ICs, petroleum->plastics) have undergone vastly greater transformation than a table (wood, glue, iron->nails), why isn't the TV much more expensive or the table much cheaper? Both are commodities and both are made on assembly lines.