FURNITURE ON A BUDGET

Home Office, Bedroom, Kitchen, Dining Room, Bar Stools, Entertainment Centers, TV Stands, and more

Quality furniture no longer means spending unreasonable amounts of money for the furniture, delivery, tax and setup when it is just so easy to shop online and get the same manufacturers brands that you would if you went to your local store. According to NOP World Ropers Report latest statistics Home furnishing for the entire home is the fastest growing category of merchandise selling online. An online survey conducted earlier this year (2005) shows that 25% of the online shoppers have purchased home furnishings online in the past year, up from 17% a year before (2004).

All forms of RTA (ready to assemble) furniture from media storage, bedroom sets to garage and storage have come a long way from the times when we would go to the local boulevard store to pick out the furniture and pay the shop the cost of the furniture, taxes, delivery fees and setup fees (if we opted for it). According to statistics compiled by AOL 2004 80% of the women online are doing chores or some other productive activity on the worldwideweb which helps them to save time every week and 58% of today's moms are back in the workforce leaving less time to shop in mom and pop stores.

Now not only are we offered unbelievable prices by quite a few online stores selling RTA furnishings including everything from home office furniture, bar stools, telephone stands, plasma tv stands, student furniture, armoires, entertainment centers etc. but we also get the manufacturers warranty along with the furniture in the event a piece is missing or broken.

With internet shopping growing so rapidly more and more furniture manufacturers are now offering the least expensive to the most expensive collections they produce. The underlying premise is because of the rapid growth in online sales and the manufacturers ability to attract the online shopper and not only the street shopper. The National Retail Federation reported that the GAFS category (general merchandise, clothing and clothing accessories, furniture and home furnishings, electronics and appliances, and sporting goods, hobby, book and music) rose 8.2% in 3/04 and "an astonishing" 9.8% in the first quarter.

Some of the few and well established manufacturers of RTA (ready to assemble) furniture who have and will continue to dominate in their fields of work are Prepac, Quebeko, Osullivan, Bestar, Sauder, BDI, Home Star, Ameriwood, Leslie Dame, Tech Craft and Intelligent Design. There are more and please forgive me for leaving them out of this article.