I recently moved into a new place near Davis Square in Somerville with my lovely girlfriend and I have been examining furniture with more scrutiny in the past month than I have for the entirety of my life before August 2010. The results have been ridiculously frustrating.
Our new place is very spacious. It’s probably more space than either of us have ever had completely to ourselves, as evidenced by our complete and utter lack of large furniture. The largest thing either of us had was a smallish dresser. No couches, kitchen tables, or lounge chairs to speak of. Now, I’m no consumer whore (or at least, not much of one): I got along just fine for most of my life not owning that junk. But now that I am some kind of adult, I figured I should live in a place with pleasant chairs and a nice couch and things.
This lead to some frank exchanges of opinions, mostly over whether or not IKEA was a reasonable place to buy a couch. I voted yes, but then again it doesn’t take much to make me comfortable. Emily suggested IKEA couches were similar to plywood wrapped in sackcloth. I wanted to counter-argue, but upon examining several of the couches in person it looks like she might be right. I bought a chair I like very much, but we decided to get the couch elsewhere.
This all led to this revelation: anyplace other than IKEA and possibly Craigslist* is absolutely awful to try to deal with. We headed to a place called Jennifer Convertibles which had very cheap prices online and looked nice. When we arrived they were literally hauling crap away in U-Hauls because the store had been liquidated. Apparently Jennifer Convertibles’ wonderfully cheap prices were not the best business model. We also considered Jordan’s Furniture, but only briefly…
That is an image of a Jordan’s store I found on GIS. Going to Jordan’s is like shopping for furniture in a nightclub with no bar that smells like plastic wrap. We considered stopping for some Space Dots, but ultimately decided to skip the circus.
After some grumbling about “grandpa furniture” on my part, we ended up at La-Z-Boy. La-Z-Boy had exactly one couch that we liked (coincidentally the cheapest one, at around 600 dollars.) All the others were overstuffed nightmares that looked like dead elephants. Emily is kind of partial to the whole “furniture that eats you” kind of thing, but I convinced her that this is more the purpose of a bed than a couch.
We drifted around the store at random for about 20 minutes attempting to find someone to sell us a couch. Literally every salesperson apparently assumed we were someone else’s children and not interested in purchasing a couch. The sales staff was positively apathetic.** Finally after going to the sales manager’s desk, someone agreed to sell us the couch. The catch? It’s out of stock. Not just at that dealer, but apparently…everywhere. We bought it anyway since it fit our budget and it was a good deal, but having to wait nearly a month to sit on your new couch chafes slightly.
The point of this giant fucking rant is that furniture buying could be made a lot better with a few simple tweaks. Being able to see what is in stock before I go somewhere would be a huge win. Buying online after I go sample some options would be a huge win, since I could avoid dealing with completely apathetic salesman. And it would be great if every Jordan’s simultaneously burst into flames and those obsequious Jordan brothers (or whatever they are) fell into the ocean and exploded.
* Though we purchased a nice kitchen table, chairs, and butcher block for a very low price on CL, we immediately rejected the thought of buying anything with a porous surface from the land of stains, smokers, and terrifyingly disgusting dogs.
** I later ascertained that this was due to the fact that no commission is given on any sale. Sounds like a great place to work! Ugh.
