it looks good, the dense foam mattress is terrific for my back, and it's holding up just fine...because I don't use it for a trampoline.

The whole thing with sheets and blanket was around $650, vs maybe $2K for a quality conventional mattress, box spring and frame.

It's perfectly fine if the bed is too crappy to pass on to my kids, because I don't have any kids. And to suggest that Bed Mart is somehow a better corporate citizen that IKEA seems ridiculous.

Maybe my bed should have been hand-crafted out of organic hemp by elves in Northern California, for half my yearly salary.

Or at least they source them from somewhere. I am planning to buy a couple of bathroom sinks and possibly kitchen counter tops when I buy the new house.

So does that mean I don't have to feel guilty about buying wood? Their sofas kind of suck anyway, and they really aren't that cheap considering how flimsy they are.

Puh-leez. Fuck Wal Mart.

Unless you consider paying 10 bucks for a two inch wooden train cheap, they are so not cheap. It costs hundreds of dollars to assemble a set of those wooden trains. I've done it.

I live in the DC area and recently went shopping for furniture. I considered IKEA, but I did want better quality than that. However, when doing searches online for stores in my area, I noticed that more than a few of them have gone out of business. There are high-end furniture places, like Ethan Allen, but with a budget of about 5000.00 for an entire room, half of my money would be taken up with just the cost of the sofa. Skan (which we like to call "Ikea for grownups") went out of business a few years ago and even Marlo is gone. The choice that I had was IKEA, or a similar store, like Room Store or Z furniture, or go very high end and deal with doubling my furniture cost. It's crazy.

Personally, I kind of hate IKEA because I'm terrible at assembly. I also would prefer quality furniture that will last. However, if faced with the decision to buy something cheaper now or sit in an empty room while I save for 2 years, I'll go for the cheaper stuff and hope to save for something better down the road a bit. I don't think I'm alone in that.

At least you were honest enough to finally mention that factoid 2/3 through the story. snark/off.

And the Billy bookcases I bought years ago still look brand new, with zero sagging under a full load of (very heavy lit crit) books. IKEA doesn't encourage disposability--it's our society that does.

By your own admission 2/3 through the article, your headline is flatly untrue. Might wanna change that.

And the point goes totally over their heads! Wow...use IKEA as an example of crap culture and the loss of craftsmanship and all the devotees of this desecendent of Scan (which was a hell of a lot more expensive because it was actually crafted by craftsmen) come out of the woodwork to defend their attachment to weird, non-standard-sized stuff that makes them feel like part of the process and this very defensiveness proves both Shell and Zacharek are precisely right about the love of disposable, cheap and essentially meaningless junk over well-crafted furnishings, appliances, etc.

John Anderson argues "It's perfectly fine if the bed is too crappy to pass on to my kids, because I don't have any kids."

Well hell, add a huzzah for the decline of family while we're at it.

The example of the satisfying sound and feel of shutting a solid (vs. hollow core) door says almost everything. We live in crap dwellings built at a minimum and sold for the most profit that can be squeezed out of those dazzled by all heat and no light. The throw-away vacuum cleaner, same thing. The landfills of our nation (and I can remember when the word landfill did not exist) are packed tight with artifacts of our piece-of-crap culture, yet people rush to defend it if it has a European pedigree to go with its ill-fitting, lightweight and style-less qualities.

And with the craftsmanship, argues shell, goes meaningful work. And this is even arguable?

Just for the record, and not that a damn soul cares, less is more, small is beautiful, human scale works well with humans, the New Urbanism is just the Old Sanity, and crap is crap. Anyone here old enough to recall when "made in Japan" was an epithet denoting a piece of crap? They got their revenge for the nuking. Now China has replaced Japan as the biggest source of crap, only now Americans are conditioned to accept the crap standard as not only adequate, but highly desireable.

We are a sad bunch, and we can't figure out why we're so god damned sad. We don't feel right, but we cannot look around and see what it is, materially, that makes us so spiritually vapid.

Thanks to Ellen Ruppel Shell for such an important and insightful book and for Stepanie Zacharek for having the termerity to review it in a positive light, considering the fact that they and the rest of us on this little island of quality are surrounded by armies of Philistines who'd like nothing more than to run us all through with a nice, cheap, disposable plastic spear.

Four stars each for the book and the review, and god help us, every one.

No, I didn't miss the point at all. I just don't care for sloppy or pointlessly sensational journalism.

I agree. I have my share of crap furniture. And my budget is small. So as I require more, and as I replace what becomes broken, I acquire high-quality second (or third or tenth) hand furniture. Sometimes the stuff is ready to go. Sometimes it needs some repair. For example, two years ago, we acquired a Duncan Phyfe style dining table with eight chairs for a seven hundred dollars. My wife redid the upholstery on the chairs, applied a light stain, and now we have a gorgeous dining set that will last our lifetime.