whats this have to do with the price of tea?Originally Posted by george wilson
southerners are suddenly easy to understand?
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whats this have to do with the price of tea?
southerners are suddenly easy to understand?
Member
just wait til the generation coming out of high school/college now is buying that stuff.
they have no idea what's what. i had this same argument with a guy on another forum a few months ago. he wanted a "kit" to build a wooden garage, and couldn't find one.
my obvious response was "you only need 2 or 3 tools to build a wooden garage from scratch, why would there be a kit for one".
he insisted that not only should there be one, but it should be cheaper than the raw materials would cost at the lumber yard.
Member
Leo,it just goes to show the level of IQ,education,etc. of some of those ultimately responsible for the junk that comes out of their factories. If the guy can't even pronounce MODERN correctly,what the heck?
Member
Hi George,
It seems to me that many people from the northeast make words with more than 1 syllable sound like they have only one. Conversely, people down south can make a single simple word sound like it has 2 (or 3) syllables
Member
Yes,I try to tell my grand daughters that the word "well" has 1 syllable !!! But,MODREN is a bit off base for the president of a furniture factory.
Member
oh my lord. im not touching this stereotype...id hate for you, your wife/sister, 14 brothers and 25 children to get angry with me.
Member
My grand daughters live in West N.Carolina.
[OP]
Contributor
If all of you fellows want to learn how to speak correctly you will have to come here to the midwest. We don't have an accent.
Member
I was raised in the Pacific North West,and have no accent.
Member
I dont speak with an accent, everyone around me hears with one. There is no cure for that.
Retired, living and cruising full-time on my boat.
Currently on the Little Tennessee River near Knoxville
Contributor
I really enjoyed this thread when it first appeared. Here is part of a review of a new book that deals with this topic somewhat:
IKEA makes money, and lots of it, by passing on to the consumer the cost of assembling its products, thus turning the consumer into part of its workforce: Depending on how you look at it, we either save money by putting IKEA furniture together ourselves, or we pay for the privilege of putting IKEA furniture together ourselves. Regardless, these tables and bookcases aren't, and aren't intended to be, heirloom pieces. But Shell wonders if our expectations are too low. We no longer expect craftsmanship in everyday objects; maybe we don't feel we even deserve it. "Objects can be designed to low price," she writes, "but they cannot be crafted to low price." But if we stop valuing -- and buying -- craftsmanship, the very idea of making something with care and expertise is destined to die, and something of us as human beings will die along with it: "A bricklayer or carpenter or teacher, a musician or salesperson, a writer of computer code -- any and all can be craftsmen. Craftsmanship cements a relationship between buyer and seller, worker and employer, and expects something of both. It is about caring about the work and its application. It is what distinguishes the work of humans from the work of machines, and it is everything that IKEA and other discounters are not."
What's more, IKEA is the third-largest consumer of wood in the world and uses timber that comes mostly from Eastern Europe and the Russian Far East, where, Shell points out, "wages are low, large wooded regions remote, and according to the World Bank, half of all logging is illegal." IKEA president and CEO Anders Dahlvig asserts that the timber his company uses is harvested legally, and the company does employ forestry experts to monitor the company's suppliers. But Shell points out that IKEA has only 11 forestry monitors, not nearly enough to keep a watchful eye on all those suppliers worldwide, and five of those specialists are devoted to China and Russia, a vast spread of territory by itself. Dahlvig says that hiring more inspectors would cost too much; he'd have to pass the cost on to the consumer.
The book deals with the true costs of cheap stuff and touches on Ikea because it is one of the world's largest retailers. I thought this portion of the review was relevant to this discussion, though.
Member
I just started reading a book called "Shop Class as Soulcraft" which, I think, will be a discussion of the tendency for educators to try to send everyone to college and denigrate those who work with their hands. Maybe I'll post a review after I finish.
Anyway, as to the discussion at hand, the author makes the following comment in his Intoduction which kind of differentiates what is being discussed here:
"As a rough working formula, we might say that craftsmanship, as an ideal, priovides the standards, but in a true mass-market economy such as ours, it is the tradesman who exemplifies an economically viable way of life, one that is broadly available and provides many of the same satisfactions we associate with craftsmanship, Also, we need to think of the craftsman as working in his own snug workshop, while the tradesman has to go out and crawl under people's houses or up a pole, and make someone else's stuff work."
Not a clear answer to the discussion here but at least a difference between a craftsman (high cost) and a tradesman (what people will buy).
Contributor
Just because something is mass produced does not mean no craftsmanship is involved. I would be extremely surprised if the people who designed and crafted the iPhone aren't very proud of what they created. And well they should be. The phone has a lot of thought and craftsmanship in it.
I know I always felt proud of the products I helped create and really enjoyed visiting customers who were using and pleased with the products.
Mike
Go into the world and do well. But more importantly, go into the world and do good.
Contributor
How many people on here knocking Ikea cabinets actually have any? I would put the Ikea cabinets in my shop up against anything else out there. Granted, I did have the professional expertise to know to use melamine glue.
In my experience, poor quality (in cabinets) is usually the result of poor assembly and not so much cheaper materials. The reason we associate particle board and MDF with inferior products is not that these are inferior materials, but that their low cost lends them to use in inferior goods. A well asembled and installed IKEA cabinet will last a lifetime if not abused. I can't imagine anything that would rip an Ikea door of the hinges that wouldn't do the same to a "craftsman" built cabinet. I know for a fact that nothing that I would apply in my shop wood be any more durable than an IKEA finish.
Truth is the sell a pretty good product (for its intended use) for less than my material cost would be.
That being said, IKEA will never be able to hold a candle to my creativity, and versatility. I can also make the customer part of the process and let them feel as though they put their own mark on the finished product. This is what the modern craftsman has to sell to the customer
Member
[QUOTE I can also make the customer part of the process and let them feel as though they put their own mark on the finished product. This is what the modern craftsman has to sell to the customer[/QUOTE]
I think this is what Matthew Crawford is trying to differentiate in his book, between tradesmen and craftsmen. But maybe that's a discussion for another thread.
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