I Am Already in Couch Hell

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I happen to be in the midst of a monthslong couch-buying process, consisting of hours and hours of scrolling and sitting on various couches, and one trip to the furniture outlets in Industry City. Still, no couch. The first and primary source of delay is indecision. A couch is a big purchase! I happen to like writing while lying on one, perching my laptop on my stomach as a kind of human shelf, and so my livelihood is dependent on it. My boyfriend and I just sat on one for untold hours while watching the World Series. I will spend untold hours watching election returns or something else as to not watch election returns soon enough. I need something that can hold up to a couch-centric lifestyle. I also need it to be kind of timeless and appropriate for multiple kinds of spaces, something that could come with us when we move. My friends have actually stopped asking if we bought a couch because the answer is always the same: Not yet.

The other problem is that we collectively in the furniture-buying millennial cohort of the United States seem to be in an extreme taste rut. Mid-century modern continues to oppress. There are more recent micro-trends that suddenly become ubiquitous before you really understand them: Boucle. The Roche Bobois bubble couch and its dupes. The “Cloud.” Couches with seats so deep you are basically buying a bed and surrendering precious living-room space where you might otherwise put a coffee table.

Then there is the issue of quality. So much of what’s being marketed right now seems to be, if I may, rickety as hell. After being fed an ad for an Anabei sofa, a nice-looking, cozy, boho kind of floppy 90s couch (another micro-trend), I thought to myself, Hmm, that’s not bad, until I saw a video from a reviewer showing it is essentially constructed like two folding chairs that you might bring to watch a child’s soccer game, except with some foam on top. The price? $1,200 (though $639.20 on sale).

Now, Amazon apparently wants to sell a $20 couch in its effort to out-Temu Temu. Last week, the company released a list of price caps it would require in its new “Low-Cost Store,” which would “ensure ultra-affordable prices for customers.” The list included $8 for jewelry, $9 for bedding, $13 for cars, and the aforementioned $20 for sofas.

An almost unthinkable concept. “Fast furniture,” like fast fashion, has inundated online stores and our living rooms with cheap, poorly made crap that falls apart easily, gets tossed into landfills, and sits there for eternity. (Somehow, I feel these things are also giving us cancer.) This kind of shoddy disposability is even the case with sofas being sold at significantly higher price points — even tasteful West Elm or Crate & Barrel fare. (Listen to some former Room & Board or Design Within Reach lovers and they will tell you “the quality has gone down” in a sort of sad voice.) To make a $20 couch possible, the industry’s basest instincts are baked into every aspect of production, as Shawn Bhimani, an assistant professor at Northeastern in supply-chain and information management, told Fast Company. “Is it the material that is basically rock-bottom price and is that potentially because it’s coming from a place where that material can’t be sold anywhere else because of the risk of forced labor?”

This development isn’t coming out of nowhere. When Ikea debuted in the United States, it did so with a Spike Jonze–directed ad campaign celebrating the idea of buying and junking furniture more frequently. In the two decades since, the furniture manufacturing and shipping industries have pushed this philosophy to become the norm, and consumers’ expectations for prices have gotten lower as our tolerance of crap has gotten higher. (Until we snap: Remember the saga of the West Elm Peggy?)

The specter of the $20 couch makes me want to take even longer to actually buy one. Buying a couch with your boyfriend used to be a rite of passage, something you agonize and fight over, and now Amazon wants to make it a throwaway activity, at the price point of a work salad with extra protein. This cannot stand. It makes me want to buy something like a futon that costs $8,000 because the guy in Maine who made it over several painstaking months doesn’t use electricity or screws. Or maybe we’ll just never buy one as a silent protest, using our old couch until it crumbles. (It’s from West Elm, so that will probably be soon.)

Correction: In an earlier version of this story, the author wrote that her old couch is from Article. The text has been updated to reflect, per a message from her boyfriend who bought the couch, that it is actually from West Elm.