Sure.
Let's look at some of the major pieces of furniture people have:
Tables, cabinets, chairs.
It's the same story with all of them.
Let's start with cabinets. A bit of cheating since most people don't consider it furniture, but worth talking about.
Most people want white or colored cabinets. The "natural wood" look is mostly out of style these days, due to mass over-production of red-oak cabinets (and thank god. they made them because red oak was the cheapest most available hardwood in the us for many many years)
Where it isn't, they want something that "looks" like cherry (or what they think cherry looks like), or mahogany but isn't.
People are more than happy to buy cabinets with thin veneers or laminated whatever on them. They have no concept of construction quality, etc. They don't care. People who do care are willing to pay, but even then, don't know what they are paying for.
Given that, what precisely supports the price differential of making "really good" for people who don't care and aren't willing to pay for it?
The answer is "nothing" :)
Thus, it's not cost effective to make cabinets out cherry, when coloring poplar reddish will do.
It's also usually not cost effective to use real wood for anything that is going to be topcoated a solid color.
But again, you have this issue that there is a high-end, and a low-end, and the middle end doesn't exist, really, it's just low-end stuff sold at a higher price. Because they can.
It's pretty much all mass produced, BTW.
Note: The last part to be automated is finishing, and as the cost of flat-line finishing machines comes down from 100k to 10k, the number of shops buying them goes up, as happened with regular CNC.
But even in finishes, people can't tell what they are paying for. In an ideal world, you want your cabinets done with a nice 2k post-catalyzed conversion varnish (US) or 2k urethane (europe). Or uv-cured stuff that is equivalent. They will be very highly scratch resistant, highly moisture and chemical resistant, etc.
Can a consumer tell? No. They will look identical at the start. Unless you rubbed acetone on them, you are unlikely to be able to tell if the finish is a post-cat or not from the finished product. You would have to place 3-4 years wear and tear on them, and see how scratched and stained they look.
So instead, a ton of non-factory cabinet makers still use pretty crappy finishes (pre-cat lacquers, etc) because they are cheap and fast. 2k stuff requires accurate mixing and has a pot-life. Good folks these days use cyclomix or equivalent, or uv cure, or something, to make up for this. But the main sales point is lack of callbacks, which is hard to quantify. This kind of quality is hard to sell. Nobody (well, not enough people) really look at their cabinets n years later and says "hey, i bet that guy didn't do a great finishing job", instead they say "gee, i guess i'm hard on cabinets".
Interestingly, plenty of commercial work will call you on this kind of thing happening. But consumers just suck it up.
That's cabinets. Let's say that's a special case for a second.
Tables.
Well, okay, so to start, people do buy mass produced really-good stuff already. IIRC, most of the furniture restoration hardware sells is mass-produced.
I've also seen really well-made mass-produced stuff at crate and barrel before (in fact, in one case, better than i could make it by far, and i've been woodworking for 20+ years)
But most people are not willing to pay for this stuff, and those who do, are willing to buy cheaply made stuff for higher prices.
Top is solid wood, pretty simple and machined construction.
You could produce it really cheaply with machines (and i'm sure they do)
But people are willing to pay 1499, and if i make the same thing, with a veneer top and same glued-on live edge (IE not "really-good"), and sell it for half price, people will buy it.
So why would i make it "really good" for 799 when i can make it "really crappy" for 799 and people buy it?
and that's precisely what happens!
Chairs are the same.
In general, people care what things look like, not how they are made or what they are made of.
So most people aren't willing to pay for quality, even if you tried to educate them about what it looked like (if you have to educate your market that you are better, you are probably going to lose)
This makes it not cost-effective to try to optimize for quality.
Somebody will just out-sell you and out-profit you by making it crappily and selling it for 80% of the same price.
This is in fact, the history of the world here. The good stuff either got pushed to the high end, or out-sold/out-stripped by people making crappy stuff and selling it at the middle end, and then making super-crappy stuff and selling it at the low-end.
In any of these markets, there isn't room in the market for this linear-curve of quality vs pricing. If quality vs price was a 10 point scale, it'd look like this right now:
quality: 1-3
price: 1-6
quality: 4-9
price: 7-8
quality: 10
price: 9-10
As a result, quality 4-9 doesn't get done much, and it makes no sense to make quality 10 furniture and sell it at price 2.
Strong agreement. For specific examples, read the history of Stanley Tools or Craftsman. Compare that to the rise of Harbor Freight and the stories the old timers will tell you about Taiwanese tools from about 1975.
My only argument -- real CNC is still north of 100k, it just happens to be worth running because of the production speed increases. The reason you don't CNC furniture like IKEA is that you get more production in less time by using custom built machines that produce specific sizes and shapes in volume. The real reason that IKEA employs the number of engineers it does is so that they can optimize production -- reuse this shape or this part in eleven designs instead of ten and you save the company two machines valued at $X million and you save Y meters of production facility floor space valued at $Z/m^2.
This is a great real-world example of the Nobel Prize winning concept, The Market for Lemons. [0]
A buyer wants to spend somewhere between price 4-6, but they aren't able to tell quality 3 from quality 7. Due to fear of getting taken advantage of, they end up settling for low quality at low price. Sellers react to this behavior, and we get the price/quality distortions described above.
This quality/price curve you describe seems to come about naturally now in our world of mass-produced things. Cameras, Furniture, housing construction, appliances, cars, etc. It's straightforward to find 'crappy', and 'nicer crappy', it's reasonable to find 'truly premium', and it's very difficult to find 'solid, but not quite premium'.
There is definitely a hollowing out of the middle ground, and I think you are correct in that much of it comes from a lack of informed customer base. Only a fleeting few are willing to educate themselves to recognize the difference between 'nicer crappy' and 'solid' even if in a well-informed market they should be about the same price.
Thanks for your writeup, I'm really getting sick of the cheap stuff that is out there. IKEA has served it's purpose for me, and to be honest a bunch of pieces have survived multiple moves but they are now usually stuck in closets or in my kid's rooms.
Anyway I'm rambling on because I'm curious if there are any decent places to buy furniture nowadays, a good table for instance? I feel like when I got dragged around looking for a dining room table to Ashley's and Bob's and whatever other chain store they are all selling the same crap, just at slightly different prices. I'm honestly thinking I would rather build my own table than buy something made out of particle board with laminate on it.
I has similar experiences with Ashley and Bobs. The Farmhouse Store is decent. They ship their orders out to Amish country (or so they say), which is also a good resource. But its solid wood and some hint of craftsmanship. (I've heard Restoration Hardware also, but can't confirm directly.)
I've been through a house fire and needed to replace furniture in most rooms over the past year or so. What I've learned is to pick and choose for quality. Family dining table to last until we move out of the house, where we're going to congregate daily for laughs, tears, homework, meals, holidays? High-quality for this family. Bookcase? Kids furniture? Cheaper the better (Sauder, Ikea) and anchor them to the wall - they're going to get beat up and are potential safety issues.
(edit) Oh, Estate Sales might be the only way to get out of that scale that Danny Bee is speaking of. Get some old furniture, and tweak it to your style (assuming thats enjoyable work to you). Just dont assume if it was made in 1960 there won't be some laminated wood veneer.
Buy vintage from Craigslist, AptDeco, estate sales, etc. The stuff that's lasted is usually of good quality, and even high-end/designer vintage that will last a lifetime can cost less than buying new cheaply made furniture from chain stores.
The only exceptions for me are couches (nobody figured out how to make a comfortable couch until c.1980) and mattresses.
Could you expand on that? Obviously people do want Ikea, so why wouldn't people want mass-produced really-good furniture?