Eventually I'm going to need new kitchen cabinets (old suburban tract home) - but I don't have $20K or more. For wall mounted boxes with doors!!!. Truly - how expensive is it to make a box with a door? >>>

Here in Portland, and lots of other places, I would assume, Habitat for Humanity has their resale stores. People donate construction items and what doesn't get used in their programs is sold at the stores. Yup, sort the Goodwill of building materials. My fiance and I are restoring my grandmother's house and much of what we are putting in came from there. And while much of the stuff is used, quite a bit is new but leftover. We picked up 2 light fixtures for the bathroom. Chrome finish, art deco design and each has 5 of those expensive clear bulbs in them. They were $3 each. Hell, the bulbs themselves are $3. They also had several pallets with new cabinets, each peice for $40. What would have cost over $1500 at the warehouse cabinet store was gotten for under $400 at Habitat.

I maintain a certain ambivalence about Ikea. On the one hand, a lot of it is cheap crap, on the other it has educated a generation to develop an understanding of European style. Without Ikea, we may have been condemned to another hundred years of roosters

But we need to educate the consumer to invest in quality - style, durability and function. These are the three things that you get when you pay for products sold under brands with integrity, especially those made in Europe and North America. Products can be made where there is a high labor cost, but it takes entrepreneurs with passion for making things and also the intestinal fortitude to invest in technology.

I always cite Wüsthof cutlery as an example of that - 100% family owned, in the seventh generation of family management and making its entire knife line in its own factory in Germany.

You make a good point. I confess, I know very little about design-- operate mainly on an "I know what I like" standard-- but art deco stuff really appeals to me. As a house-warming gift, my mother gave me Ikea's Tirup swivel chair, in lilac. Words cannot express how much I love it. It's not only beautiful but very well made, and I will keep it as long as possible.

There is so much wrong information in your post I don't even know where to begin, so I guess I'll have to start at the beginning.

I imagine someone in the mid-50's complaining "Why, I had to switch from my wind-up Victrola to a newfangled electric model and now they're moving everything over to LP record players. They're just trying to sucker me!"

Uh, no. The first LP was introduced in 1949. Record companies kept pressing 78s in the U.S. until the late '50's and in other countries until the mid-60's. (The Beatles were pressed on 78s for India and the Phillipines among others and highly collectible today). Hardly a sudden transition. Also, the LP record was a tremendous bargain since you got 10 times more music for a comparatively small markup in price. The record companies at the time knew that the new equipment itself was the problem, so they would offer players for free if you bought so many records and made deals with other vendors to used record players as incentives for other big ticket items. My parents got their first high-end record player for a song when they bought a new couch. Hardly the same as some clerk informing you only weeks in advance that a switchover was coming.

Or for slightly more contemporary references, replace "a salesclerk snottily informed us that Best Buy would be stopping the sale of VHS tapes within weeks" with "a clerk snottily informed us the store would stop selling LP discs" and replace the idea of phonographs with CD players and you have some idea how ludicrous your charges are.

You're right about that, because it didn't happen that way. If it had the music business would be in worse shape than it is. In fact, the LP to CD transition took years and was consumer driven, not company driven. There was actually a period of time when cassette tapes were going to be the next thing to replace LPs, but they also broke and had inferior sound quality. When the CD came along, most consumers needed no convincing to buy them. The first CD players were very expensive, and companies had the wisdom to keep selling tapes until the price of CD players became more affordable.

As far as DVDs being more durable than VHS. Probably. I happily started buying DVDs over video once I had a player. But it took awhile to get a player that was affordable (again, that old money bugaboo). Since my husband and I had a brain in our head, we figured it was a little irresponsible to go out and buy something we could not afford (i.e. put it on a credit card) when we had children and a mortgage and all those other pesky things to spend money on, which is why sellers of nonessential items should not overplay their hand. If food goes up in price, I still have to buy it. If movies and the machines to use them go up, I can do without.

I watched Blue Rays on my son's Playstation before he moved out last year. Sorry, but I just don't see that much of a difference except that I can see an actor's facelift scars more easily. Blue Rays are not so much better than I'm going to run out and buy yet another player. Maybe in a couple of years, but not now. Sorry for my lack of cooperation.

By the way, music sales are down 70% from ten years ago, so I'm certainly not going to say that present-day companies are doing everything right. And, oddly enough, they pressed twice as much vinyl last year than they did the year before.

You might want to check out the New York Times online for an example of how change is usually good, but not always. It's about how record companies snottily (yeah, I'm going to use that word again) neglected to press a lot of 78 music, most of it by black artists, onto LPs. Now the masters are gone and the only way to recapture this music is to find the 78s.