Cheap Chinese

The last 30-ish days have been crazy for me.

I went to Beijing and Taipei with my manager between 3/19 and 3/24 last month. Right after I came back, I went to San Diego for two days on 3/29 and 3/30 for another business trip. The week of 3/26 to 3/30 was a little hectic just because of the tiredness and the load of trip report and emails to close on. But it was just the beginning. My family was moving to a new apartment on 3/31, so that weekend was miserable. I got up early in the morning on Saturday (went to bed around 2AM on both Thursday and Friday night), rented a U-haul, loaded the truck, drove to the new apartment, unloaded all the stuff, and drove to IKEA to buy a bed frame and a computer desk, all in one day. Every weekend since then was spent on house cleaning and shopping.

The weird thing is that everything we bought since we moved to the new apartment had some defects in one way or another.

First, it was the bed frame from IKEA. Everything looked well, but one corner of the frame end was poorly Casted, so I couldn’t fit into the socket of the bed end very well. It was taken care of by some brute force with a hammer.

When the mattress set was delivered, we noticed a small hump at one corner of the mattress, which looked like it was overly pressed. Ok, not a big deal.

Then the computer desk from IKEA had some wood chips on the front plate of the top shelf. Well, it looks alright if one does not pay attention to the details.

We also bought four sets of chairs and chair mats from IKEA and one office chair form Costco last weekend. One of the chair top boards was poorly cut – it’s about 1cm shorter than others on the left side and ~0.5cm shorter than others on the right side. Not a big deal if someone sits on it, but it’s not symmetrically made for sure.

One of the dining chair mats was also different from others. All four mats have the same patterns, but one of them was sewed differently.

Finally, the office chair was a total disaster. The seat plate has three holes used for attaching the back support with three screws. The three holes were somehow drilled too big that the screws of the back support simply could not lock up. So we had to drive to Home Depot and buy three sets of screws with nuts. To tight up the nut, I used a cheap wrench from Dollar-Store that kept getting loose, and it took me forever!

And that’s only what happened so far. Life is not always perfect. I guess I will just have to learn to deal with it. We also need to buy a coffee table, a TV table, and we have a brand new Plasma/LCD TV on the quarterly budget list. I certainly hope/wish that no more defect to be found when I buy more furniture. Besides the imperfections, fixing them one by one is simply annoying.

One thing worth to mention is that besides the mattress damage, which was probably due to an accidental abuse, everything else with defects were “Made in China”. The cheap Chinese never had any concept about “Quality Control”, so I don’t know if IKEA and Costco should take the blame for buying products from bad suppliers, or if the “shitty” qualities of Chinese vendors are too widely spread to prevent in the first place.

Well, at least everything is pretty much in place now…until one day the office chair’s back support breaks and kills my back!


Tags: life, Blog, IKEA, Costco