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.
Buying lumber has always been a lottery unless you plan on spending a fortune on really good reliable hardwood lumber. I was never able to afford that.
So I worked like every rough carpenter I learned from you use everything you can get your hands on and use your skill, experience and imagination to make it work. If I start with a load of lumber, I’ll separate everything between good, bad and terrible piles. Terrible stuff gets immediately hacked to small support pieces, bad stuff is hidden in places where imperfections won’t be noticed and the good stuff gets placed in critical locations where obvious flats and straight surfaces are needed. Anything bad or terrible also becomes temporary supports or scaffolding, then for me, it gets chopped into small pieces and burned for camping or used for warmth in the winter … good dried lumber is excellent fire starter or a fuel for fast burning to warm up a cold or frozen cottage.
Buying lumber has always been a lottery unless you plan on spending a fortune
See, this is what I’m saying.
We’ve already got at least one person in these comments, though, who absolutely insists that it used to be different, somehow. I don’t need to be an old timer to know that it simply couldn’t ever have been any other way, apart from the way it is now.
Cheap things will always be worse than more expensive things and trees have always had knots and wavy bits in them. Nobody can change either of those facts, therefore there was NEVER ANY MYSTICAL GOOD OLD TIME, WHEN CHEAP LUMBER WAS AWESOME.
It’s just that these older motherfuckers were having a good time in their lives, getting good money for entry-level jobs, getting the kind of sex that you got when abortion and the pill had just become legalized, paying $22.50 for your mortgage payment, etc.
When shit was that good for your ass, do you really think you were going to remember those times that you had to deal with a warped board? One that cost 24 cents or whatever the fuck?
On the other hand, when those same old guys have crippling back problems that they can no longer get opioid painkillers for, they’re paying 2024 prices for their blood pressure medication and their cholesterol medication, and they haven’t gotten so much as a handjob since 2003…well NOW they’re going to notice and remember when a board is fucked up.
That’s the phenomenon at work, when these old guys insist that hardware store lumber used to be great shit.
What’s so hard about the concept that things may have worsened over time? Worse lumber doesn’t mean the worst lumber.
What’s so hard about the concept that things may have worsened over time?
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.
Binary thinking isn’t worth arguing with because it’s simply too stupid to be
