These things are made of garbage and glue and they want to charge this much for them??? Seriously considering just buying some real wood and making it myself. We tolerate this chipboard crap BECAUSE IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE INCREDIBLY AFFORDABLE.
My cousins recently bought an extending table from a hardwood place, only to find out that the extension bit in the middle was not hardwood but actually some cheap material blend (I can’t remember what unfortunately).
When they complained they were told that it had to be this other material because you just can’t make that kind of table out of hardwood.
In my house right now there is a table from the late 19th century that folds out the same way as my cousins table and it is made from hardwoodwe have the technologyfor goodness sake’s.
the quality decline of the everything needs to die, I need to kill it with my fists.
While I also mourn the decline in quality and specifically sturdiness of objects over time (damn plastic), it’s not always true that because something existed in the past, it means we know how to make it now. Techniques get lost if no one writes them down/craftspeople don’t pass them on. Two very old examples are Roman concrete (which i still don’t think we have totally solved) and a blue ink used in manuscripts called folium (only very recently rediscovered how to make it), but I’m sure there are more recent ones as well.
I’m dead certain that we have not lost the art of cutting hardwood planks
I also figure that with something like a folding table that we still have existing examples of in functional use today it’d be easier to reverse-engineer how it works than, say, old dried ink we don’t have a recipe for getting the color of. If it really was a case of having lost the technique.
What I expect they mean is not “it’s impossible to make that out of hardwood” and more “but if we don’t give it a part of the table that will break relatively quickly we won’t have customers buying them from us continually!”
(Unless the issue is getting lumber from trees big enough because IIRC for some things that is a legit problem due to a lack of mature trees from so much logging and how long it takes trees to grow to the size needed. But I don’t think in the example of a table meant for a normal residence that you’re gonna run into that.)
Absolutely not an expert but I do think this is a problem of access to the correct sort of wood. I understand that professional craftsmen probably do not shop exclusively a the Home Depot, but that being said, a lot of the lumber you can find for purchase at hardware stores nowadays either warps easily or is already warped when you buy it. It is a lot easier for manufacturers to make a flat, light piece of chipboard than it is for them to try to source large, straight planks of hardwood. Old Growth Forests just… aren’t so much of a thing anymore.
My town’s main industry is pine production, in a world that makes sense our cheap furniture would be made of low-to-medium quality pine planks. Pine isn’t the ideal furniture wood but it’s miles more suitable for it than chipboard. But they export that and sell us glued together sawdust and charge more for it than they should be charging for nice hardwood. $300 is what that cabinet should cost if it were made from good furniture wood.
