alt Hacker News>Of course hand made tables are expensive. They service a sliver of the market. Ikea serves the rest of us who'd prefer not to eat off the floor.
And yet my working class grandparents didn't eat off the floor, they had great quality tables.
Mine is made of disguised cardboard.
This is a big part of the problem, there is zero trust that any potential improvement in cost or access will reach consumers. Companies don't even bother telling us it will.
We will just be slowly moved into accepting a degradation as the new normal.
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How many hours it was required for them to work to earn money for that table?
The truth is people mostly want not an improved version but cheaper one.
The cost improvements reached you, you just don't see them in the table quality.
You see them in the fact that every single home you'll visit to buy or rent has a fully equipped kitchen including a fridge, oven, likely a microwave, dishwasher and even a washing machine (which alone has a huge economic impact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gvsz_vc7B0)
You see it in the fact that your home is safer from fires than it ever has been. That hot water is a cheap passive thing you don't even think about, rather than something you have to plan for. That a TV is a nice add-on to it all, rather than a huge deal to get.
Your grandparents' table was more expensive because they had less things, and the massive wood table that they saved months for was what was kept and stood the test of time for you to see today. Because let's not forget, this is also what furnishing 100 years ago can look like:
https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod/images/furnishing-for-h...
And my dinner table is solid wood from IKEA.
Affordable quality is perhaps harder to find in the US than in some other countries. Because professional salaries are so high, the top 10% is responsible for ~50% of consumer spending. That makes middle spenders a less lucrative market than in countries with more equal incomes.