Callum Robison, in his book Ingrained after learning a table and furniture he made was never used, or, found bouncing around an after-sale surplus market, reduced to a “trinket”:
For days, I tried to understand why this was so unsettling. We were paid to make it, and paid reasonably well. Something I never really let myself think about before. All the time and care we’ve invested into making things like this for big brands over the years. Believing they were important. That they mattered.
Where did I really imagine they’d all been ending up when the store’s interior was refreshed? Something that happens in retail as surely as a change in the seasons. This one, at least a found a new home, and haven’t been turned into landfill. But what about the others?
He ends by saying, “What I really want is to be as far away from all this as possible.”
