I move often and so I often have to buy new furniture. It is cheaper to buy new furniture than to move old furniture. Plus my friends often like my old furniture so I give it to them or donate it to Goodwill. It is also fun having new furniture pieces so it’s kinda a hobby I guess.
I moved into an apartment and bought a recliner from one of the cheaper national chains. It seemed comfortable in the store. It turns out that as you use it, the foam crushes, and then a very hard piece of wood pokes you in your lower back. The chair turned out to be unusable about a year after very light use. This tends to be what happens with cheap furniture.
As I have said before I love going to Goodwill so I happened to be there and they had the best furniture section I had ever seen. In most goodwill stores it is one row, but this had an entire section of the store filled with furniture of all types. I found a fantastic chair that looked brand new and was sanitized and was only $45. I looked up the cost online and the real cost was over $1500 new.
I went back to Goodwill about a week later and even better I found a chaise lounge which was new! It was a display model and looked perfect. I could see the tag on the bottom which said its year of manufacture and the reason it was there is that there was a tear on the bottom fabric underneath the chair. It cost $55. I gladly took it home as well. I looked up the cost online and the real cost was over $300 new.
So in total, I bought two wonderful chairs worth more than twice what I paid for the cheap furniture, and only paid $100. It just doesn’t make sense to go to furniture stores anymore. For the cost of some inconvenience, you can get better deals almost everywhere. Even if you don’t use Goodwill there are plenty of people who put things on FreeCycle or donate to other free charities.