re: WSJ - Significant increase in poor quality furniture in the US

quote:

---

Upholstered furniture like couches, sofas, lounge chairs etc are all made in the US. About half of them are made in NE Mississippi.

---

Most of it has poplar for a frame and is actually pretty well made. Theyre are some manufacturers who use a lot of paper and sheating or worse to build frames from but if it is built out of poplar or oak or some variant the wood in it is good for years. Any metal may be suspect.

Most of the stuff sold in chain furniture stores is made in Asia and is made from Bananna wood which is also a fantastic material to build frames and even wooden furniture. It doesn't have a lot of character but it can be stained and finished to mimic almost anything and is about as sustainable as wood gets (it has to be steamed or boiled to use as lumber which probably uses a heap of energy compared to air dried lumber) but it is extremely workable and durable. We import almost none of it in unfinished lumber.

On the same subject there is no plywood made in the United States that is worth a tinkers damn. No matter how much it costs American and North American manufacturers will not make quality sheet goods. They surely have the ability but they do not do it. Chinese plywood is INFINITELY higher quality than anything manufactured in the United States or Canada. It may be glued together with glue made from human beings or somce toxic chemical that will kill you graveyard dead but it will be dead flat, nearly devoid of voids and square. North American plywood is none of these.