The Sofa Search

A Memorial Day essay on the high cost of furniture...

Since the Dawn of Time (assuming Dawn was sometime in 1865 when German inventor Heinrich Westphal invented the coil-spring mattress) kids have enjoyed jumping up and down on their parents’ bed and parents have reacted like those kids were caught setting the house on fire or building a shrine to Satan or singing show tunes while trying on their mother’s high heels and all those hyper-active kids wondered why their parents were so freaked by what seemed like innocent fun and semi-recently I figured it out:

BECAUSE THOSE PARENTS PAID FOR THOSE MATTRESSES AND KNEW HOW MUCH THEY COST.

Google “mattress sales near me” and among other items you’ll be offered is a $2,729 Beautyrest Black Hybrid CX-Class 13.5 Medium Mattress and I have no idea what all that means except it sounds vaguely racist and like a Nazi scientist might be involved and for $2,729 I’d expect it to be full of high-quality weed or poor-quality blow and for that much money I should also get to spend the night with Demi Moore.

And yes, that’s a completely unnecessary reference to Indecent Proposal the 1993 film based on the unlikely idea that Robert Redford would pay Woody Harrelson one million dollars to bang his wife and Woody’s wife would go along with it. (And if that turned out to be a good idea and have a happy ending, they would have called the movie Pretty Woman.)

Which reminds me…

If I remember correctly it was standup comedian John Caparulo who made the logical observation that straight guys who sit around and ask each other if they’d perform oral sex on another guy for a million dollars are out of their minds (this kind of deeply philosophical and possibly homoerotic conversation usually comes up about a six-pack into an evening) because if some dude had a million dollars to spend on a blow job, would that rich dude spend it on a blow job from a guy who looked like him?

Good point.

After googling “why are mattresses so expensive” I was led to a CNBC video that had mattress company executives explaining their products’ obscene prices by talking about the cost of commodities like steel and black holes in the space-time continuum and the unforeseen consequences of using a pitch clock in baseball, but the mattress-price explanation that made the most sense to me was mattress profit margins often being anywhere from 50 to 900 percent.

There are Columbian Drug Lords who don’t expect that kind of profit. (Unfortunately for me Tony Montana was Cuban, but I think my point is still relevant.)

Anyway…

The price of furniture recently became an issue when I decided to buy a couch which I needed to do because when he was young, one of my sons liked to jump up in the air and land on our couch (apparently the furniture-abusing impulse is multi-generational) and now that couch is partially collapsed, lumpy and uneven and propped up with paperback books under the collapsed parts and since I have a lifestyle that requires a great deal of slouching I spend a lot of time reclined on my damaged couch.

Bottom line:

I’ve got pretty much the same relationship with my couch that Roy Rogers had with Trigger and if I can ever train my couch to come when I whistle, I’ll die a happy man.

So I Go Furniture Shopping

As I begin my sofa search, all I know for sure is I want to spend less than a thousand bucks because my first three cars cost less than that combined and unless sofa science has made huge advances I don’t think I’m going to be able to drive my new sofa anywhere.

The next conclusion I reach is I don’t want a white or crème-colored sofa, but that’s what every furniture store I visit has stocked up on and the first sofa salesman I talk to admits a white sofa is a bad idea if you ever spill a soft drink or miss your mouth while drinking your daily Irish coffee or drop some fried rice while eating General Tso’s chicken and I say let’s look at some brown sofas because I plan on doing all that stuff.

So I sit down on an $800 sofa which is OK, but then make the strategic mistake of sitting down on an $1,800 sofa and while I’m no Princess and the Pea Mattress Connoisseur, my insensitive backside could still tell the difference.

Damn it.

The salesman, sensing a weakness in my financial-limit defenses, says he’s also got some $2,000-and-up sofas made by the Amish I might want to look at.

Apparently the Amish are to furniture what Saudi Arabians are to oil, but I take a pass because I don’t want to find out how much better a $3,000 sofa feels than an $1,800 sofa and also because I don’t think a high-end Amish sofa will include a date night with Demi Moore.

Plus…

The salesman tells me the $1,800 sofa I’ve already got a crush on will last at least 17 years and I ask if he’s got any 15-year sofas because I don’t plan on living that long. (I’m guessing kamikaze pilots didn’t buy a lot of ripe bananas or join too many Book-of-the-Month Clubs.)

More Shopping Around

So now I decide I should shop around and over the next week visit four more furniture stores, one of which was IKEA and when I sat on it, actually liked their $800 KIVIK sofa.

But then I ask about having it delivered because it’s got to go up a flight of stairs with a 180-degree change of direction and I have absolutely no plans to get personally involved in that project. (Hey, I became a cartoonist to avoid physical labor and so far that’s worked out pretty well for me.) But I find out IKEA delivers the sofa in unassembled parts and I have to put it together myself.

Say what now?

When did that start?

I google “how long does it take to assemble an IKEA sofa” and the answer is 45-minutes-to-five hours, depending on your religious views (who knows, you might be Amish) and whether you get frustrated and throw your Phillips-Head Screwdriver through a closed window and can’t find it afterwards and have to go to the hardware store to buy a new one.

(I’m not a criminologist, but I wonder if anyone has made a connection between mass murders and the recent purchase of an IKEA product. Maybe the Manson Family had just purchased an unassembled IKEA STUVA loft bed.)

So now the IKEA sofa is off my list because I don’t want a part-time job assembling furniture named by the Swedish Chef and also because the assembly instructions probably say things like:

“Step 1: Inerhoven der schmakasborg mit un offenflaven.”

After looking at a lot of sofas, I also realize I want straight arms not cushioned ones because sofas are measured at their widest point, so an 88-inch sofa with straight arms has more room for lying down than an 88-inch sofa with cushioned arms (and you didn’t think this would be educational) and I also don’t want a sofa that is raised up off the floor because the area under the sofa shouldn’t be visible; I plan on using that space to store my museum-quality collection of dust bunnies and all that fried rice I plan to drop.

Next I go online to read sofa reviews which doesn’t help one bit because while commenting on the very same sofa, Review One starts out:

“Worst couch ever made.”

And Review Two’s opening line is:

“Best couch ever made.”

And I don’t know if the first consumer is the kind of person who sends food back in a restaurant because it doesn’t have enough spit in it yet or the second consumer is the kind of person who orders their steak rare and doesn’t complain when it comes out looking like the aftermath of a pagan ritual.

Nevertheless, I’m narrowing my sofa search down.

I Finally Get My Mind Right

So now I’m thinking maybe something I sit, slouch, lie and possibly die on isn’t the right place to save money because I’ve only got one spine and I should take care of it even though I rarely use it. Plus who knows what an $800 couch will feel like and look like five years from now and I don’t want to go through all this sofa bullshit twice in the same decade.

Sofa shopping hint:

If you ever want to feel OK about spending $1,800 on a sofa I’d recommend looking at as many $3,000 and $4,000 sofas as possible because then $1,800 seems like a bargain.

So I go back to the first store and agree to buy the first sofa I liked and the salesman – who told me how well-constructed it was and how long it would last when he was trying to sell it to me – immediately tries to sell me a Bad Sofa Insurance Policy that will cover all the things sure to go wrong with my new sofa almost immediately if not sooner.

Random question:

I’ve got a Dell XPS computer and have had it for 14 years and like it a lot and looked into what it would cost to replace it and I don’t get how a piece of technology that allows me to read, write, listen to music, watch movies, search for information and doctor photos so I look 23 pounds lighter than I actually am costs $1,559 while a sofa made out of wood and foam rubber and a little bit of metal that allows me to do a total of two things – sit or lie down – costs $1,799.

I’m guessing those 900 percent profit margins are part of the answer.

(I’m also guessing the slave laborers used to build our computers and smart phones and sneakers work for a lot less than the Amish.)

So here’s the couch I bought, but I need to change it to a darker color to hide all the things I plan to spill on it, so I’ve got to wait six-to- eight weeks for a team of Lutherans to assembly it (the Amish were out of my price range) which is a pain in the ass, but it’s a Flexsteel sofa so I clearly picked the right brand and here’s proof:

That’s right…the Flexsteel Furniture Salesman (who clearly ought to consider switching to decaffeinated coffee) jumps up and down on the inner Flexsteel cushion supports and he can do that because they feature “Blue Steel Technology” which was developed in a secret lab by former male model and current furniture designer Derek Zoolander.  

Considering the number of hours I spend on my couch on a daily basis, odds are excellent that’s where I’ll die and when that happens I want to be buried lying on my new sofa so I’ll be comfortable in the Afterlife (and I’m wondering how nobody ever thought of that before), but if some obscure and completely unnecessary federal law requires me and my sofa to be placed inside a huge wooden coffin which has to be custom built, for God’s sake, don’t take that project to the Amish. 

My heirs can’t afford it because I spent all my money on a sofa.