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Having moved a little over a year ago, at least in the US, the consumer has every option in the world for furniture. You can buy high quality, fully built and assembled furniture delivered to your house for (yup) a high price (possibly a fair price, but high - and past our budget).
You can also hunt out that same / similar furniture from a variety of discounters. Also, you can move down in price and still get decent quality furniture fully assembled and delivered. And at each step, there are discounters of all sorts.
On and on it goes - quality price trade offs, less quality is usually less expensive (not always), nice store and easy service usually more expensive, buy on line and deal with shipping/assembly/service issues usually saves money, buy used save more money, willing to assemble save more money....
Perhaps (we rarely buy furniture) the market has moved in one direction or another (it's implied above that it's moved to assemble-yourself furniture), but our experience is that - no exaggeration at all - every single option and combination of options exists with the to-be-expected trade-offs priced pretty much as you'd expect.
Consumerism, market or just human nature - we found nothing odd about the options in the furniture world.
Full disclosure, we are still 70% unfurnished as our renovation was more involved than we thought and then our parents' health issues seemed to expand right when we moved in - so we haven't returned to buying what we need yet. But when we do, I'm comfortable that all the options will be there for us.
Fun aside, there's a good old movie - shown frequently on TCM - "Executive Suite" that centers on a furniture manufacturer and, in part, the quality price trade off of the marketplace.
You can also hunt out that same / similar furniture from a variety of discounters. Also, you can move down in price and still get decent quality furniture fully assembled and delivered. And at each step, there are discounters of all sorts.
On and on it goes - quality price trade offs, less quality is usually less expensive (not always), nice store and easy service usually more expensive, buy on line and deal with shipping/assembly/service issues usually saves money, buy used save more money, willing to assemble save more money....
Perhaps (we rarely buy furniture) the market has moved in one direction or another (it's implied above that it's moved to assemble-yourself furniture), but our experience is that - no exaggeration at all - every single option and combination of options exists with the to-be-expected trade-offs priced pretty much as you'd expect.
Consumerism, market or just human nature - we found nothing odd about the options in the furniture world.
Full disclosure, we are still 70% unfurnished as our renovation was more involved than we thought and then our parents' health issues seemed to expand right when we moved in - so we haven't returned to buying what we need yet. But when we do, I'm comfortable that all the options will be there for us.
Fun aside, there's a good old movie - shown frequently on TCM - "Executive Suite" that centers on a furniture manufacturer and, in part, the quality price trade off of the marketplace.
Consumerism rules.
