I've owned two couches, both purchased twenty years ago at a surplus hotel furniture place. One of them was never really comfortable, but it folded down in to an almost queen bed and the utility was undeniable. And it was still much more comfortable than anything Ikea carries. The other is a conventional couch and quite comfortable. And over the years i've patched then, repaired the springs, washed the surface carefully, and done everything I can to take care of them because all the times I've ducked in to a furniture store or Ikea in the last couple of decades I've marvelled at how grotesquely uncomfortable the sofas were.
When building boffers, foam clubs and swords on a fiberglass core, for larping we had "tech". As in technology, technique, concepts for building safe, reliable, and handy " swords". And one of the key techs was the idea od "progessive give". You start witha. Core of hard, stiff foam around the fiber glass core. The hard foam is less likely to be damaged by the fiber glass and creates a stable base for additional layers of foam. As you work outwards towards the "blade" you use progessively less stiff, cushier foams. The result is "progessive give". When the sword hits you, instead of a rock hard foam that hurts like hell, or a soft foam that the fiberglass core will rip through very quickly, the varying layers of foam act to protect both the weapon and your opponent. It's cushy. It's comfortable.
And it would make a great seating cushion. I know it's all costs and profit bs, but i'm always a bit bewildered that the techniques for getting the most out of foam bats invented by smart, dedicated, working class nerds for their hobby don't get carried over to manufactured foam products that are supposed to be comfortable.
That's also how foam mattresses are made and yet every couch cushion is just one slab of shitty foam that quickly deforms and loses all support
I guess we should... cut out the middleman
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I don't even have a sofa and they tell me "the most important piece of furniture in your home"?
If you build a sofa with good craftsmanship and from quality materials it will have a steep price tag that the proles cannot afford. If you build a sofa from sawdust and oil and with a flimsy slightly underdimensioned construction you can sell it for cheap to the masses with the added benefit that it will break in five years' time and you can sell another one.
And if you build a sofa made of sawdust and charge 3,500 dollars for it you'll be the talk of bourgeois avenue.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
But education often comes only with time
Like how do I get good at buying things are supposed to last decades?
I think they mean societal education. Like the pipelines for educating people about these scams will develop as people get fed up with being taken advantage of.
As for personal education, that would probably happen the first time your $1000 couch starts off gassing a chemical that smells like cat urine after being exposed to a spilled glass of water, or the cushions pop open after someone sits down to hard.
Eduction is one way of putting it. Another one would be that people knowing other people and what they do could be construed as a commons that is essential to capitalist exchange. And that the destruction of that commons (or its pollution with pseudo internet information) is making products worse.
It doesn't matter anyways, because the trusted brand with good reviews uses cheaper materials like everyone else.
