Furniture Imports from Asia are now Radioactive Too??!!!

Most people I talk too seem oblivious as to reasons why furniture imports from Asia are so cheap. It has long been determined that the use of illegally harvested timber in unregulated offshore sweatshops goes a long way to explaining the low, low prices at discount furniture stores.



But now there's a new bargain thrown into the mix. Apparently because of the tragic earthquake and tsunami in Japan last month, and the resulting nuclear disaster at Fukushima, containerloads of furniture bargains coming in from Asia are now turning out to be radioactive too.

This is excellent news for bargain hunters. Perhaps we shall soon see furniture ads that read something like this: "No money down; Don't pay until 2012; and the higher the Micro Sievert reading on your Geiger Counter - the bigger your discount."




Given that most of this crap ends up as landfill within a couple of years anyway, perhaps our government needs to start reclassifying our garbage dumps as radioactive waste sites now too.

Ugly Furniture

There's "ugly", and then there's "Fugly".

Fugly happens when ugly and hideous are used in the same sentence.



My favorite line from the video is: "Believe it or not, most of this stuff came to us this way."

All humour aside it never ceases to amaze me how much fugly crap continues to flood into North America by the container load. It's not just furniture, but also appliances, clothing and even food. (Yuck)

When you consider the sheer scale of this phenomena you'll come to realize that somewhere in China there's probably a factory exclusively dedicated to producing fake rubber dog sh*t for export to novelty stores in North America and Europe.

Is this the sign that the Western world has achieved its apex as a civilization?

The photo below shows a massive container ship, but it's difficult to tell whether it's bringing in the fugly or shipping out the $$$ and jobs necessary to support the factories of fugly offshore.

Probably both.

Of course when it comes to fugly furniture it's common knowledge that most of it will fall apart and end up in your local landfill long before the easy payment plan is paid off.

When I ask people why they buy this crap, the usual answer is because it was cheap.

Exactly.

So is it any surprise that you got what you paid for?