The Fancy Rug Dilemma

Hey HN - long-time lurker and decided to start writing essays (inspired by PG and many of y'all as well). This one came from months of joking with my friends about different "fancy rug" problems which led me to think about my own "fancy rugs". Enjoy!

I can’t speak for the rugs you viewed, but some products take literally hundreds of man hours to make.

My partner recently picked up some fine crochet bedspreads. These intricate bedspreads each must have consumed multiple weeks of labour. I understand this is also true of hand crafted Chinese and Afghan rugs - around a month per square metre for an Afghan.

In contrast, those basketball shoes you collect are mass produced and apparently consume around 3 hours of direct labour. You could have many tens or even hundreds of those basketball shoes for the labour value of a moderately size Afghan rug.

Bro almost discovering Marx, Veblen and the others

This is not really Veblen situation. A lot of these are primarily money laundering outfits, the artificially high prices, are simply a means of converting cash into bank deposits. Similar schemes exist in art, sculptures, and jewelry. There are some mom and pop type stores that are legit and some of the money goes to actual artists who make these but the ones in Palo Alto (or similarly unattainable rent neighborhood rug shops), are not that.

It’s thirteen years old now (2012), but there’s a fascinating old Forbes article (from when, I think, it was a respectable publication) about the cross-pollination between Palo Alto’s rug dealers, and Palo Alto’s venture capitalists:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2012/03/21/silic...

What is the downward sloping arrow in those charts?

Is there an unspoken assumption here that value is absolute and deviations pathological?

I can't understand how heirloom quality is abstract any more than say color scheme.

How is valuing a sneaker collection more abstract than valuing, say, minimalism or utilitarianism?

I've re-read the post multiple times, but I'm clearly missing something basic to allow comprehension.

Sure, let's take a rug as an example. I don't think there is one breakpoint. I think there are a set of axis of quality you invest into, roughly sequentially, as you go up the price scale of objects:

- $50 - Something rug-shaped exists

- $100 - Durability

- $200 - Materials

- $500 - Comfort and design

- $1000 - Basic craftsmanship

- $2000 - Refinement of craft

- $5000 - Artistry & identity

- $10000 - Tradition

- $20000 - Mastery

- $50000 - Rarity/historical importance

- $100000+ - ?

Because most people don't cross-shop $20k rugs and $200 rugs, most people are focused on one or two aspects around their personal budget. The essayist mentioned being amazing by the craftsmanship and artistry (see scale above). A broke college student might just want something that holds up in their dorm room and see what materials it's made out of and comfort as meaningless and abstract. And a billionaire shopping for a rug for their office might take everything other than rarity/historical importance as a given and just be thinking about that.

I think there is a large cognitive bias to consider everything you can easily afford "tangible and important improvements" and everything you can't as "abstract"!

I thought those stores are basically hobbies for the wealthy local commercial landowners that own the building(s). They may anecdotally also be money laundering. They don't need to actually be a profitable business. The only cost to run it is basically lost rent for that space.

What a nice personal website! I like the quotes section, the essays section. It's cozy and personal.

Interesting read, I'm surprised nobody has brought up Pejman Nozad who is the owner of one of the more popular rug shops. https://pear.vc/team/pejman-nozad/

His money doesn't come from the rug shops. He sells rugs, but the rug shop was where he used to meet investors and founders and make investments. I assume the rug shop in Menlo Park has a similar background.

The idea of rugs as heritage and identity so thoroughly offends every anti-consumerist ideal I have that I find it impossible to take this author seriously. Please tell me this is satire?

I realize the OP was using rugs as a metaphor, but they are works of art, just as much as samurai swords would be for Japan.

Rugs were prized in nomadic and semi-nomadic cultures like Iran, where all your valuables had to be mobile. Traditional rugs require many, many hours of craftsmanship and are indeed works of art with deep cultural resonance. Turkmenistan even features a rug on its national flag.

Sadly, also a dying art despite its millennia of history as most rug weavers in Iran or Turkey have better options in factories or jobs. For the moment dirt-poor areas of Afghanistan, Pakistan or Tibet still weave, but the future is machine-woven rugs from China, possibly with machines deliberately designed to mimic the imperfections of hand-woven ones.

This really made me think - and not just because I went to Artsy Rugs last week and talked with the someone there about a rug that I bought at an estate sale and which I would like more information about ( http://provenancevault.com/treasures/12x16-persian-rug-ajrk8... ) but also because I've been moving to a new house the last few months and going through a lot of the possessions I've accumulated, deciding what to keep (definitely things with strong sentimental value or family history) and what to get rid of (a lot) but also what it means to have things. They can be both a joy and a connection with the past as well as a burden.

And because of that, I started building this website https://provenancevault.com/treasures/discover (it's probably not ready to introduce widely yet, but relevant to this conversation)

Small thing: keeping old books is a bit like a physical memory palace. Granted, it may be pointless/way to costly to cling to a collection of say outdated books read as an adolescent, but we tend to remember better if we can access at least the visual image of the cover.

So my advice is to take the pictures of book covers you have to get rid of. And organize them be it by the time period you have read them, topic or something else. One day you may be able to fish out memories you didn't think exist anymore.

They really tie rooms together

Very much appreciated the essay. The abstract / meaning / story component of many current-day products (value propositions) these days is unbelievable. I’d like to understand it better.

Basically, if you want to create a successful product, you have to offer some kind of relatable and attractive story for people to buy. And it is not the same thing as producing a good product per se. I’m struggling with that. And see great many people around struggling too.

I appreciate the reading music, thanks.

Oddly enough, I know some of the long time rug sellers on University Ave and another without a storefront as a side business. Some of the vintage collectible ones go for $150k+.

I inherited my grandparent's 40-year-old Tibetan silk rug about 4x6m with a crazy dense weave. It's in storage, lol, because using it would wear it too much and sending it for cleaning it is a PITA. It's basically a white elephant item. I wished I had walls tall and long enough, because I'd consider framing it like a tapestry if direct sun wouldn't hit it.

I really love the recommended background music while reading this article. More blogs should adopt that - really quirky.

I always assumed that the rug shops were for money laundering.

Palo Alto may buy a lot of rugs, but it seems like one shop should be sufficient to supply the entire city.

Though now I am imagining Palo Alto rolling out its new, grand vision for commerce: to become the Rug Shop Capital of the Greater Bay Area. In cooperation with Stanford Business School's new program in Rug Store Management, and the department of Rug and Textile Studies.

Rug stores also seem to be perpetually "going out of business", but I don't know if this is actually the case and why.