Facepalm

For the past months now already I’m searching for a new desktop table, since my actual one is now already eleven years old and getting more and more ramshackly by each day passing. I’ve been at several furniture stores around me, including (of course) IKEA, Möbel Gamerdinger, Heyne Büromarkt, any some more. Also, I’ve been searching for tables on the internet at several different online-stores and even found quite a few tables that really fit my needs. The only thing that didn’t fit on any of the desks I liked was their pricing – and I really can’t understand how this could be.

What’s a desk typically contained of? Well, mostly, one big plate – in my case some rectangle one with for example 180cm x 80cm and legs, usually four in number. And actually this is essentially everything I want and need. If you would now stumble through the different (online-)stores and search for exactly such a table, you would probably be shockingly disturbed by the prices furniture stores charge for one piece of wood with four legs. Let’s take IKEA as example: They charge 179,00€ for a Galant Desktop-Table (160cm x 80cm), which is essentially only four table-legs, mounted beneath a frame which holds a plate made of pressboard – sold as a mass-production article, where the costs for fabrication probably are way under a quarter of the price they charge. Besides, at least the demonstration desks within the IKEA store were so shaky, because of their cheap built-up, that I wouldn’t want to have my iMac placed onto one of those, until I’d like to buy new hard drives every few weeks. And at last but not least: The way the table looks can hardly be called “design”.

Next store, same issue. Poorly designed desks made of cheap materials, ugly fabrication but prices within the range from two-hundred to five-hundred or even more Euros. And all I was thinking was “What’s the point?!” – there is no relation between the quality of those mass-produced tables and their prices. Don’t get me wrong, of course a lot of costs for crafting, producing, transportation and more come together – and I might not even bitch that loud if at least the materials they would use would have been real wood plates and solid steel-frames and -legs – but especially in those days I can’t see any relation between the price and the quality of those products. In my opinion, furniture stores achieved a status where they can just pull out the customer’s money off their pockets with nobody complaining about it. When some hardware producer prices its products at extremely exaggerated values you hear blogs and news-sites complaining about it. Why don’t they do so with furnitures? Are furniture-stores/-producers now already on the same level with car manufacturers and the music industry? For me, it seems so.

However, since I’m a person which works at his desk a very large amount of time and wants to feel comfortable while doing so, I’ve decided to not buy any of those mass-production-crap-desks for myself. Instead, I’m looking forward at desktops like Sublevel’s iDesk or Holmris’ Milk. Both of those tables are made of qualitatively high materials to assure stability and both look just gorgeous. Of course, those desktops are priced at a totally different level, although there’s one difference that should be kept clearly in mind: Those are no mass-products. Those desktops are custom design work, containing innovative and practical features.

I’ve already received the price listings for the different version of Milk and will yet keep looking around for a bit more, until I’ve found the table I really really really want.

Update: Yesterday I finally got a desktop table, although it was more like a spontaneous buy. I purchased the Galant table I was talking about, with the A-legs and, instead of a crappy wooden-plate, a gorgeous black glass one. For the whole table I paid around two-hundred bucks in total, what now really is a good price. Why I’m thinking so? Well, instead of the cheap and ugly want-to-be-real-wood plate I got a piece of glass which usually costs nearly two-hundred bucks itself, plus a half-way-solid frame with chrome legs that fit together pretty good. I’ve mounted the desk and yet, as I’ve expected, I’m experiencing “shocks” thru vibrations of the objects lying on the table (lamp, iMac, etc), but I’ve already found a way to screw the table’s frame to the wall behind, in an unobvious and clean way, to reduce the vibrations on the table itself. So, as I’ve said before, the table’s frame was not worth one penny, unfortunately there was no other way for me to get the glass-plate lifted to 70cm (or more) – besides building myself an own frame.

Also Still, I hope the furniture stores/industry to suffer from the depression just like the automobile industry has (and will continue to), so maybe the thinking there will change in a way to provide the people prices that fit the actual product’s quality/value someday.

An annoyed and disappointed goodbye for now.