It was the best of products and it was the worst of products. It was a tale of one man trying to find an affordable chair.
Several years back I shopped at WalMart and bought a card table with four folding chairs for around $50. I was really disappointed because I didn’t think a card table would be worth more than $30 or so. This story however is not about the card table, but about chairs. Each WalMart folding chair would last about one month of sitting. At first the glue or whatever crap they used to attach the back to the metal frame would slowly wear out, and the back would just fall off. It was also attached with these punch hole sorry-excuse-for-bolts thing. You can imagine that this would be a problem: your sitting device wears out after a month.
So there was one conclusion to this: never buy anything from WalMart ever again.
For a replacement I went to Target. Target prices are slightly more than WalMart, but their goods seem to last longer. They had one folding chair, with fabric seat, for about $20-25, I can’t remember at the moment. Even better the back of the chair wasn’t just glued on. I inspected the back and found four sturdy looking bolts or screws.
I grumbled and paid for the chair. It’s great. The back didn’t fall off after a month!
Here it is months later. I go to get up from the chair. I push back the chair, and suddenly it collapses on its side. Another chair bites the dust!
I sat on the floor in shock as I thought, “Hey, I’m not fat!” Mario has not in fact defeated Bowser and rescued the Princess. My dream chair is still in another castle.
I inspected the chair. The bar that supported structural integrity of the back legs had sheared off. The legs and support bar are hollow pieces of metal welded together. Another shining example of why you should never rely on punching metal or cheap welding.
More importantly, my economic philosophy has failed, and I am left wallowing in misery contemplating what the damn price for a folding chair should be and how long I should expect it to last. Maybe I should focus on trying to figure out the text pointers as part of my Seiken Densetsu 2 Hacking I mean get my personal travel destination site up with content.