Pick Up the Pieces

Author’s Note: It’s that time of year again for a short break so loyal Laughable Feast readers will be treated (or subjected) to a few weeks of summer reruns. Some of you have seen these golden oldies before, and may even remember them, but many haven’t so hopefully these posts from three or four years ago have stood the test of time. The summer lineup is as follows:

July 3rd – Discovering Lewis & Clark

July 10th – Romper Room

July 17th – The Doctor Will See You Now

July 24th – The Pink Slip

July 31st – Thumper

August 7th – Pick Up the Pieces

August 14th – Mad Man

August 21st – Lawnmower Man

August 28th – Dude, Where’s My Brain

I hope you all have a wonderful summer. We’ll be back with fresh cooking for the Laughable Feast table on September 4th.

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Pick Up the Pieces

Can I tell you something?

I shouldn’t admit this, but I’m old enough to remember buying furniture that was not only delivered to your door, it was actually carried inside and placed wherever you wanted it. And it looked exactly like what you bought in the store.

This miracle of modern convenience not surprisingly began when a furniture maker made furniture. These carefully crafted creature comforts were then whisked away for display in the showroom of a furniture dealer to be fawned over by anyone and everyone – from recent college graduates looking to furnish a tiny studio apartment to well-heeled older folks redecorating their Cape Cod vacation home.

The recent grads probably had to put their Murphy bed on ‘layaway’ since their credit score was the same as their body temperature, but however purchased, the pieces were delivered and ready for immediate use. Because they were fully assembled. Miraculous, right?

I first learned of this complex commercial system observing my parents and was able to successfully use it myself when I reached adulthood and was granted a modest line of credit by the good people at Visa. Real furniture, at least anything you could actually sit on or sleep in or would hold your haute couture collection, did not come cheap. But the whole setup seemed like a good business model and worked well for centuries – people making furniture, people buying furniture, and people using furniture until it was so worn out or out of date it was embarrassing to host parties.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.

I don’t want to alarm anyone who’s been out of the furniture market, but at some point, in the not too distant past, furniture makers stopped making furniture. I’m not kidding.

Oh, they kept right on making the parts necessary to make furniture, they just stopped short of that critical last step in the production process when they would assemble the product they intended to sell. I’m not sure exactly when this occurred because I either was not buying furniture at that time or more likely was led repeatedly by my wife, Lori, into one of the handful of remaining stores that dealt in rare and expensive assembled furniture. But it happened. My question is not when this happened, but why.

I had heard about IKEA and it sounded innocent enough. Some of our friends had been there and bought stuff, and there were murmurings at cocktail parties about this magic kingdom where you could put together a room – an entire room if one can imagine – with an ensemble of stylish, modern furniture that didn’t require a bank loan. I’d also heard about the meatballs, but I must’ve missed the murmurings about having to build the furniture yourself.

Now don’t get me wrong. Although I’m not jingoistic about my heritage, I’m mostly Swedish by descent and am immensely proud that a capitalist company was able to spawn in and then free itself from the suffocating democratic socialism of Sweden to conquer the world of furniture. I’m just pissed that they don’t fucking assemble the furniture.

And at some point this concept of inexpensive unassembled furniture metastasized from a benign tumor of trendiness, one that afflicted only the truly impoverished or fiercely frugal, into a malignant cancer that invaded and incapacitated an entire industry of furniture makers and the millions who depend on furniture for comfort and convenience in their daily lives.

I guess I was blessed with a strong immune system because I was able to ward off this disease for more than a decade. But it was inevitable that I would succumb to something so virulent, and about eight years ago, at Lori’s virulent insistence, I found myself standing at the massive entrance to an IKEA store. We had spent an hour finding a parking spot and walking to the entrance, but that’s another story.

Within seconds of entry, I found myself skipping merrily down the yellow arrow road, arm in arm with my wife, and discovered a kinship with the cowardly lion I’d never felt before.

There were no barriers of any kind on either side of the yellow arrows, and no security guards to correct your path should you stray, but some unseen force kept us glued to them as it led us deeper and deeper into the belly of the beast.

I fought off waves of rebellious thoughts and discarded various plans to escape, and after half an hour realized if I had stepped off the path I’d have been lost for a week. Or worse yet entirely missed the bath section.

Our tour of IKEA’s multi-level showroom, including some very focused but extensive comparison shopping of numerous items I didn’t know we needed or wanted, took almost two hours. It would’ve been longer if we’d stopped for meatballs, but it was mid-morning and I generally don’t eat meatballs until after noon. Lori had selected a large number of items to purchase, some of which were small enough to fit in our dumpster-sized shopping cart and fully assembled. Such as the towels.

The larger items, heretofore known as furniture, were represented only by red tags she had taken from various displays. I assumed this was so we could present them at checkout and an efficient team of Nordic body builders would appear promptly with our prized possessions. I was wrong.

First, we had to find them ourselves in a warehouse the size of Delaware. Most of you have been to IKEA and I will spare you further detail of the visit, but after locating the items, wrestling them onto a small flat-bed truck, negotiating the crush of furniture pilgrims massed at the checkout gates, wrestling them into our compact car, escaping the parking lot, wrestling them out of our compact car and up the elevator into our apartment, we stood and proudly surveyed what we now owned.

A large pile of large boxes. And some towels.

Mission accomplished, right? Again, most of you have fought this battle – if not you’ve probably ordered unassembled furniture from Amazon or Wayfair or god forbid Overstock – so you can shout out the answer to my rhetorical question.

First, we cut up the boxes, made five trips to recycling, and disposed of enough Styrofoam to fill five IKEA shopping carts.

Already exhausted, we were now confronted with a slightly smaller pile of odd-shaped pieces of particle board covered with thin veneers of a shiny substance, bags full of bags full of odd-looking hardware, and an instruction book devoid of instructions save for page after page of diagrams with lots of letters and numbers and arrows whizzing around.

Skipping ahead to Step 14 – we progressed slowly without incident to Step 13 but had to retreat to Step 5 because we attached an R to an L instead of the L to the R – we finally stood back to admire the finished set of drawers, none of which opened or closed quite the same, wiped our sweaty brows with the fully-assembled towels, poured ourselves each a very full glass of wine, and had a good cry. And that was just the first piece of furniture.

Late that night, we took stock of what we had – three chests of drawers, two bedside tables, a tall cabinet for the bathroom, a TV stand, two hernias, ten bloody knuckles from using the miniature Allen wrench, and more sharp pains and dull aches than we could count. All in places we’d never had them before.

The good news is we saved tons of money by shopping at IKEA. I’ll pause here for a moment while you have a good laugh. The fact is, you can get reasonably priced meatballs there, but you’re paying basically the same price for the furniture as back when furniture was sold as furniture. And even if there were modest savings, had I known what the day and evening were going to be like, I would’ve happily paid a thousand dollars more to have our furniture come fully assembled and delivered. And a hundred bucks on top of all that for some meatballs and another couple bottles of wine.

But back to my question of why. It seems to me that other industries have survived and even thrived while still absorbing the crippling cost of assembling their products before selling them. Why not furniture? Did they think it would be easier for us to do it? Maybe for some of you it is. Heck, I’ve even had people tell me they like assembling their own furniture, and frankly I think they’re nuts. So, maybe they thought they were doing us a favor. Or, did they think we’re just stupid? Okay, don’t answer that one.

Anyway, it’s not hard to imagine some villainous furniture maker twirling his moustache and snickering at the thought of selling his wares for the same steep price while making us assemble them ourselves. And pick them up at his warehouse or pay a fortune for shipping. Bwahahahaha!

So, this is where we are. I’ve managed to work through the shock, denial and grief, and have finally found acceptance. I’ve even purchased an adult Allen wrench, and haven’t had to backtrack in the instruction book since the debacle with the dresser. I’m reasonably sure I’ll survive making my own furniture, but what really scares me is what’s next? Are we soon to start assembling our own major appliances? And if putting together a refrigerator is such a snap, why not our own computers and cars? Or meatballs?

Thanks for listening. Talk soon.