Now $515 will buy only a piece-of-crap table that’s new, unless you spent more time looking for an antique (which is probably the route I would take). But if I chose to buy a new table, then the equation would become more complex and the money would become more diluted. That $515 would end up split among the furniture store, the furniture distributor, the owners of the furniture factory and the people who actually made the table. My money wouldn’t reward making something as much as it would reward moving something or storing it until it could be sold.

And I should add that a 40-hour table from a furniture store is unlikely to be something that will last forever. That’s because mass-manufactured furniture is a terrible compromise, like mass-produced beer, bologna or aerosol cheese. Manufactured furniture never perfectly suits the space or its intended use. It might be close enough for the time being, but it is almost always made using low-quality materials and joints. It is furniture intended to be replaced within a few years–itself a relatively new and awful idea.

…

After I built my table, I lost the desire for another one. After I built the chair that I sit in at that table, I eliminated any desire I had for a better one. And so on. The process of building my own furniture extinguished forever my longings for commercial furniture. And I found this attitude seeping into other areas of my life. I now can’t stand poorly made clothes, books, food or tools.

If I cannot build or grow something myself, I try to buy stuff from people who also care deeply about the things they make. I buy meat, bread and vegetables from local merchants who cut the sides of beef, bake the bread and grow the vegetables. I haven’t eaten in fast-food restaurants since the Clinton administration. And I like to buy tools from the people who actually make them.

I want to reward the people who do the work in the same way that I am directly rewarded when I do the work at my bench in my shop.

– from The Anarchist’s Tool Chest, by Christopher Schwarz, p. 344-346