This Is Why Your Furniture Sucks Now
How bad trade deals and IKEA ruined Americans’ couches and tables.
By Nicole Bardasz, More Perfect Union
If you’ve ever bought a couch from Wayfair or tried to assemble anything from IKEA, you know that furniture is worse now.
All of a sudden furniture, which used to last for generations, has gone the way of fast fashion — everything is poor quality, falls apart quickly, and is probably a cheap copycat of another design.
So what happened? The answer can be found in North Carolina.
Furniture built before the mid-2000s was more likely than not from the Tarheel State. The state’s first furniture factory opened in High Point in the mid-1890s, and within a century it dominated American furniture manufacturing. By 1980, High Point became known as “the furniture capital of America,” usurping the title from Grand Rapids, Michigan.
North Carolina’s plentiful hardwood forests provided high-quality material for furniture factories. But more importantly, the state also had access to a large pool of cheap labor, in the form of Black sharecroppers and poor white tenant farmers who were looking for new work following an agricultural depression.
These workers were paid $821 per year in 1929, about half the salary of furniture makers in the North. Factory owners exploited racial divides to prevent workers from unionizing in order to pay both Black and white workers less. North Carolina was also one of the earliest “right-to-work” states, putting the full thrust of the state against unionization.
High Point also sat on the highest point of a railroad line, making it easy to ship large and bulky furniture out to consumers. At the time, consumers would pick out furniture from local showrooms, and factory workers would carefully package and ship the items—in one piece—to their door.
This all changed with the introduction of IKEA, the Swedish furniture giant. The factors that had brought the American furniture industry south to North Carolina —cheap labor and easy transportation — set the stage for its demise.
For years, the difficulty of transporting furniture made the industry more resistant to globalization. IKEA, however, revolutionized the industry by popularizing flat-pack furniture. IKEA used cheaper, lighter materials and detachable elements to ship items more efficiently. Consumers became responsible for assembling products at home, cutting down on labor costs.
When IKEA opened its first store in the U.S. in 1985, only 2 percent of furniture in the country was flat-packed; within seven years, its share had increased fivefold.
“It definitely readjusted what people expect,” said furniture expert CoCo Ree Lemery. “No one is expecting a full piece of furniture to arrive at their doorstep fully assembled.”
The fast furniture revolution only accelerated after President Bill Clinton signed the U.S.-China World Trade Organization Agreement, a deal that cut U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports, and vice versa. “We’ll be able to export products without exporting jobs,” Clinton said at the time.
Spoiler alert: the opposite happened.
American furniture makers started moving their factories from North Carolina to China, where wages were much lower, and laid off more than 1,000 American workers per year. Soon after, Chinese companies learned to make popular American styles and began competing in U.S. markets themselves.
Within seven years, 60 percent of the U.S. furniture market was dominated by Chinese companies. In just one decade, the American furniture workforce was cut in half, leaving entire towns in North Carolina unemployed.
Which brings us to the furniture hellscape of today. Now, IKEA sells one Billy bookcase every five seconds and makes one every three seconds. We’re flooded with an excess of shoddy fast furniture options, like those offered by Wayfair, that don’t last — and likely end up in massive landfills. And workers in overseas factories are paid low wages in terrible conditions, as manufacturers compete to cut costs, and therefore prices, as low as possible.
“The only people that are actually positively benefiting are people who are like C-level executives who basically show investors, ‘Oh, look at how much profit I've driven,’” said Ree Lemery.
This is a story about how good-quality furniture disappeared — why the industry stopped building furniture that lasts for generations, what happened to the workers and communities that used to build these pieces — and President-elect Donald Trump’s claim that he’ll bring these furniture jobs back.