Yes, that shit is warped and has knots in it. Yes, if you want the shit that doesn’t have warping and knots, you do indeed have to pay more money.
This is how all commodities, products, and services have worked, since the first time someone had the idea of trading one resource for another resource.
Please try to wrap your head around the concept. Better things cost more. This should NOT be blowing anyone’s fucking mind.
The fact that trees change their characteristics over a timescale of hundreds/thousands/millions of years, not a few decades. Lumber has not gotten worse. People’s memories are just faulty.
What defines different grades of lumber can easily change and if you’re paying attention to the world, it’d be hard to imagine that not happening
Changing the fine print about lumber grades could cause changes in the middle grades of lumber. That’s absolutely a thing.
You could easily notice a change in what is considered almost-the-most-premium versus middle-of-the-road lumber.
But the top and the bottom aren’t going to change. They CAN’T change. It’s physically and logically impossible for them to change. The highest price will always get you the actual straight, consistent, knot-free pieces. The lowest grade will always be filled with warped wood and knots.
I’m simply not wrong about this. Good money = good shit. Cheap prices = worst quality. These concepts are not up for debate. They are simply facts.
As a counterpoint I introduce monster cables.
Ridiculously expensive with no appreciable gain in quality.
Prices are subjective and you could easily sell someone lesser quality for a higher price.
People scam people all the time.
So no, good money does not equal quality.
Your concepts are up for debate.
I’ll concede that the principle isn’t 100 percent infallible. And certainly, people are always trying to scam buyers into thinking they’re getting a premium product, when they’re really not. But we’re really not even talking about the top end of the lumber situation, are we?
We’re talking about old-timers fantasizing about some mythical time when the cheapest possible lumber was somehow not the worst lumber. That DEFINITELY never happened. There was never a time when people were randomly selling perfect boards at the cheap lumber price. There’s no incentive to do that. Maybe as, like, a loss-leader item, in some kind of specific promotional situation, maybe. But then you’d know that’s what was happening. Like, the store is trying to get you to come in for great wood, and hopefully you’ll buy a saw or a drill.
Again, that’s not what people are talking about, when they go on rants about hardware store wood. They’re either surprised-Pikachu mode because cheap lumber is shitty, or they think they can remember some time in the dinosaur era, when cheap lumber was generally good. Truly, for the last time, THAT WAS NEVER A THING.
Have you ever seen old lumber?
The quality was way better, the whole scale has fallen compared to back then.
The best stuff now has the potential to beat the common grade sure, but it is not likely.
So to them it is true, they have just seen higher quality.
I made a headboard out of some would I got out of old houses, super nice and tight grain pattern.
The width of one ring now could easily be as wide as 3 were in that wood, maybe 5.
This is so simple and so true from what I’ve heard. I don’t understand how op doesn’t get it
Binary thinking isn’t worth arguing with because it’s simply too stupid to be