Empire of Furniture

Monday, March 3, 2025

Empire of Furniture

You drive for a couple dozen or so kilometers along LeCong Liu where the truly monumental showrooms that are easily a dozen soccer pitches floor space by 12 stories high, then they start to thin out to merely gargantuan multi floor showrooms and then the simpleton single floor showrooms that are only as big as a football field and then to the single bay entities of some weird guy sitting there selling a single chair type...and cigarettes, lots of cigarettes...and LeCong Liu is just one of several major arteries that are all similarly packed with showrooms winnowing down to more weird guys in tiny stalls selling a single type of something...and don’t forget the guys standing on the curb selling....literally...a single chair, forlornly dreaming of working his was into the only game in town...and you come to where the factories begin.

You make a left turn, the road gets narrower and windier, then another left turn and into narrower and windier to the next left turn and narrower and smaller concentrical patterns...and you start wondering if the repeated left turns are sucking you into some vortex whirlpool of furniture entities and then it's obvious all these streets are probably 1000 years old and were originally just village dirt alleyways and and a giant city grew up around them and there's beehive like activity all around and it’s a miracle you don't massacre entire families on their scooter with a mistimed left turn and you suddenly arrive at....

MaxSun Furniture (established 1989), supplier to all the luxury hotels in Dubai and apparently most luxury hotels around the world. You pull into the exceptionally clean parking lot, park, and are politely directed to the salesperson who directs you to the surgical footie installer where your feet are automatically swathed in Operating Room Blue footies so as to not track Foshan filth into their immaculate showroom.

You notice on the way in a constant parade of supply trucks, from sanbonza (“three-wheel bouncer”) to large panel trucks, bringing materials to be turned into mattresses and furniture, with an equal number of trucks loaded with furniture going back out and you recall going to Abt, the local Chicago megastore and thinking this is a nice mattress showroom, and now you're in what seems to be the largest mattress showroom on Earth because it might be, and Abt seems like a mom-and-pop operation at an exit off I-94 somewhere over the border in Wisconsin.

We pick out a sofa, it’s the wrong size, salespeople immediately call their designer to verify that specific sizing for this model can be accommodated, affirmative, you can have it just like you want it and how soon can we deliver it?

I glaze over and wander back out into the entry arena while Mei and Ajer dig into details of bed frames and mattress selection that I just don't care about and watch the activity. It’s like military drill team operations with foam coming in one side and mattresses going out on the other side and you notice the workers are not merely diligent. You notice something remarkable.

They're not just working fast. They're running between tasks and warehouses. RUNNING. The fever pitch is palpable. In all the sh*tty jobs I’ve held, I have never seen anything approaching the organizational perfection of this joint.

Why do we come here? Because they will make the sofa that the monster showroom is offering for 35,000 RMB and sell it to me for 10,000 RMB, and it’s not just 1/3 the cost, it's vastly better quality on every count from the wood used in the frame to the multiple layers of high density foam, not to mention immaculately crafted leather upholstery. There’s a reason they supply the luxe joints in Dubai.

The mattresses? The nicest mattresses I have ever laid on for about $750, with a range of options I didn't even know existed. Did you know you can get an Alpaca mattress? I didn't. A silk mattress? Of course.

So, I asked myself...why hasn’t the US market adjusted to this? Why are great quality mattresses in the US $5000? Is it because of oligopolies in the sale side here? Tariffs? Export restrictions?

Later, I am lying awake in the middle of the night, staring at the darkness and wondering the same thing. Focused research and a little nosing around into corners would probably result in a PhD level dissertation on the matter. Which is to say, I don't know.

When I was deep in the midst of a stumbling light fixture manufacturing business (long since abandoned) light fixtures in America would go through about a half dozen (or more) hands, each applying a 100% (or more) markup, not to mention complying with UL listing requirements (a total scam at this point) and payoffs to receive ASTM accreditation (another scam), with product liability laws (scam) and insurance companies (mostly scam) requiring those stamps of approval for a product that costs about $3 to manufacture ending up being $487.99 before sales-and-use taxes, not to mention local taxes of all sorts, which, when I look at the expenses for my apartment building, taxes and related regulatory costs end up being about 50% of my operating costs. Wanna know why rents keep going up?

So, as the smallest of small fry, I like to point fingers at all the useless government required horseshit as causing the unnecessary increase in cost. But, to make myself feel better, I remind myself that my tax dollars are going towards public schools making our children incapable of reading a book and supporting dithering idiots in Evanston city government that are only now waking up to the idea that the reason there's a housing crisis is...and this, after expending several million dollars on consultants to decipher the mystery..... we don't have enough houses.

I imagine there's a similar pattern in mattresses and furniture. We bought real direct from the factory in a country that doesn't have all that bullshit layered on to every step. Here, the scam is paying off the local Party asshole, which I don’t have any figures for.

Will tariffs correct the grotesque imbalance in trade? I’m open to opinions, but I don’t think so.