The demise of my sleeper sofa.

When did furniture become so cheaply built?

When I retired from the big DC law firm in 2020, the firm graciously offered to buy me anything I wanted, up to a certain price point. I opted for a full-size sleeper sofa. I figured it would be a great way to have both seating in the new place in Santa Fe and sleeping accommodations for overnight guests. Plus a full-size sofa would fit best in the 500-square-foot apartment I was getting. Genius, right?

Here's the sofa I asked for:

Stolen from Wayfair's website

Here's the sofa I got (I bought the throw pillows just recently): 

Lynne Cantwell 2024

You'll note that it has three sections across the back, not two. That's because what they sent me is a queen-size sleeper. It pretty much dominated the living room of that little apartment. It fits better in the condo -- but that has become a moot point since this happened a couple of weeks ago:

Lynne Cantwell 2024

See that little stubby piece of metal sticking up at the bottom of the picture? It was once welded to the pipe that I'm holding. The bed part still works fine; the sofa part, not so much. 

The two-by-four is part of my attempt to support that loose pipe so that the weld on the other side doesn't also break. It's working about as well as you'd expect.

The sad thing is that the sofa was actually pretty comfy. That's unusual for a sleeper, in my experience, and it runs counter to a recent trend that consumers have complained about: reasonably-priced sofas that look good online but are super uncomfortable once you receive them. I could blame the pandemic for my troubles -- I did take delivery of the sofa in the middle of 2020 -- but it turns out that people had been complaining about the quality of new furniture for years before the supply chain broke. 

What's the culprit? Cheap imported furniture, which caused sales of US-made furniture to crater, causing those manufacturers to lay off their workers and sell out to hedge funds -- which have done what they've done to every other part of the manufacturing sector they could get their hands on. That's how you get the Broyhill name attached to crappily made furniture sold exclusively by Big Lots. The made-in-the-US furniture companies that have survived, according to the article at the link above, are building much more expensive products for affluent customers who can afford to hire interior designers to do their shopping for them.

As for the rest of us, it might be worth haunting thrift and consignment stores for well-made pieces from the past. But who has that kind of time?

If I knew someone with a welding setup, I suppose I could get my sofa repaired -- but I don't. And taking it to someone's shop seems problematic. So I'm biting the bullet and buying a replacement from Apt 2B. The company has good reviews (which, hopefully, they didn't pay for), the furniture is made in the US (they claim), and the mattress will definitely be full-sized. It was three times the price of my retirement gift, but hopefully it will last longer than four years. 

It sucks to have to get a new sofa so soon.

Anyway, I'll report back.

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These moments of bloggy planned obsolescence have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe! And make sure you're (still) registered to vote!

Whither the CD player?

I'm going to take a break from current events this week and talk about another facet of our late-stage capitalist dystopia: electronics. Specifically CD players.

While I'm a progressive politically, I'm old, so I'm a Luddite when it comes to certain things. I admit freely that I have not yet embraced the digital age 100 percent. Yes, I publish my books as ebooks; yes, I own a Kindle; yes, I have a smartphone and a laptop (and a several-generations-old iPad that has sat unused in a desk drawer since I moved here four years ago). But I have not yet succumbed to digitizing my music collection. Strike that: At one point I spent hours over several days uploading a bunch of my CDs to Apple Music on my laptop. Then I got a new laptop. Everything made the migration to the new machine except my CDs; the album cover images that I'd painstakingly uploaded made it, and I think maybe the playlists, but not the actual songs. Then I learned that Apple uses a proprietary format for music files, and there was probably no way to get those songs to transfer from my old machine to the new one.

What I took away from the experience is that uploading stuff to the cloud gives the cloud owner the rights to your stuff, and they may or may not let you keep it. Which I already knew from a debacle many years ago involving ebook files that disappeared from users' devices because reasons. Hence, I have not given up my actual, tangible CDs.

The challenge these days is to find something to play them on. For maybe a couple of decades, I owned a Bose Wave music system with the add-on CD changer. It looked like this: 

Stolen from the internet

It was hella expensive. I used to get really nice holiday gift cards from my bosses at the law firm, and one year I used my gift card to buy this system. It worked great for many years. But then, as Facebook reminded me earlier today, the changer started giving me error messages on various CDs and finally refused to play any of them. When I got hold of someone at Bose customer service, I was told it was a known issue, and they recommended that I unplug the changer or it might mess up my main unit. Reluctantly, I did. 

That was four years ago. The main CD/radio soldiered on for another couple of years, but then the CD player in it started to die, too. So a few months back, I started looking for a replacement. Of course Bose doesn't make Wave radios anymore; you can get a rebuilt one in random places, but they're super expensive, and I'm not getting those really nice gift cards anymore. So I looked for something less bougie.

My options were pretty limited: either I could go back to the component setup that I'd ditched in favor of the Wave or buy a glorified boom box. I settled on this: an AIWA Exos Home Speaker. (Note that it's marketed as an external speaker that just happens to include a CD player; this is where we are, kids.) I figured that AIWA used to be a decent brand and the unit would probably have acceptable sound quality.

When it arrived, I pulled it out of the box and set it up. I put a CD in the slot and tried to get the drawer to retract. Didn't work. Shoved it shut with my hand. Of course then it wouldn't open again and it wouldn't play.

AIWA customer service was very nice about it. The unit was clearly still under warranty -- I'd just bought it! -- and the rep told me to pack it up and send it to them on their dime, and they'd send me a replacement. He also assured me that I'd get my CD back.

So I sent the broken machine back, and in the fullness of time, the replacement arrived. And it works! But then I tried putting it in the space where the Wave radio used to live. Of course it's about a quarter of an inch too tall. 

The Wave radio fit on the shelf under the TV. The AIWA does not.
Lynne Cantwell 2024

But I can play my CDs again. The sound quality isn't as good as the old Bose, but I didn't expect it to be, and part of the problem might be my hearing issue. 

Did I get my CD back? Of course not. Is it worth calling AIWA again? Not to me!

But now I'm tempted to replace my TV stand so that the CD player will fit. In fact, a full entertainment center would look great on that wall. I could use more bookshelf space, as well as more storage space for my DVDs and Blu-Rays (which I am also hanging onto, thank you very much).

The answer to every problem in our late-stage capitalist dystopia is to spend more money, right?

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The hearing issue: I can't remember whether I've mentioned this here before, but I have an acoustic neuroma in my left ear that has been affecting my hearing for the past four years. It's to the point now where we need to do something about it, so I'm going in next month for a "gamma knife" radiation treatment. It will be a couple of years before we find out whether the treatment is effective, and I won't get my hearing back regardless. But I'm hoping that it's successful, as the other treatment option is brain surgery. Which I would rather, y'know, avoid.

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These moments of bloggy retro consumerism have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!