David Rosenthal: observation

Transcript context

…Flashing forward a little bit to today, it’s interesting to look at all the downstream things that happen from flat-packing. (1) It enables this space-saving in trucks. It enables you to do more volume for the same cost. (2) There’s a cost reduction since customers can do the labor and transport. Before, you had to have someone at your company put the chair together, and that costs a lot of labor. Now you’re putting that on the customer. You’re also making it so the customer has the capability to transport the merchandise in a way that they couldn’t before. They had to have a truck. Mail order was the only way to make this happen. You’re not going to drive away or get on a bus with a table. Absolutely. There’s a further cost reduction since it decreases the broken merchandise in transit. There’s this third amazing benefit to flat-packing. Ultimately, they pass all this along to the customers, meaning now their products are definitely the least expensive on the market for their quality. And psychologically it gives this feeling of accomplishment. It increases your fondness for whatever object you assembled because of the labor, the blood, sweat and tears that you just put into it. You feel like I made this. We almost broke up, but we didn’t. And four hours later, I have the cabinet together.…

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