On the Clock by Emily Guendelsberger

Author:Emily Guendelsberger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2019-07-15T16:00:00+00:00

“When you started, the actual parts were all manufactured here, too, correct?” I ask Douglas, a salesperson in another showroom who’s been in furniture for more than a quarter century.

“Most of it,” Douglas says. “When I first started, some of it began to go offshore, then more and more followed. So many of the wood plants here are vacant.”

The shift overseas, he says, was attributable to “cost—strictly cost.”

“The cost of paying American workers?”

“Yes,” he says. “A lot of people will say, ‘I want only American-made’—but when they see the price, it’s not as important to ’em.”

“What goes into the price?” I ask. “The furniture is gorgeous, but… yeah, I could never afford any of this.”

“Well, it’s how it’s constructed,” Douglas says. He indicates the sofa I’m sitting on. “This has a hardwood kiln-dried frame. The frame is corner-blocked, glued and screwed, eight-way hand-tied—that’s a coil that drops down into the frame of your furniture and is literally hand-tied off to the frame eight different ways with a heavy nylon.

“The alternative is a sinuous coil, a continuous s that goes from front to back. It’s a lot less expensive to manufacture. But this”—he pats the sofa’s arm—“is how you get longevity. Eight-way hand-tied furniture is furniture you’ll always have. My parents have had their sofa for twenty years, and it looks brand-new. Or—may I show you a piece?”

He shepherds me over to a wooden table whose surface is a complex inlaid mosaic. It’s breathtaking. So is the sticker price—$7,899.

“Now, this is true furniture at its finest; you can feel it,” says Douglas, running his fingers over the seamless inlay with pride. “This is an honest-to-goodness piece of art.”

He’s not wrong. But my last paycheck for two weeks of work at Convergys came to $525. If I saved every single penny—no food, no rent, no gas, no car payment—I’d have $7,899 in about four months.

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