Ulster Tatler – August 2019

This month, Ian Sansom goes sofa shopping.

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ummer, it turns out, is the best time

of year to buy a sofa. Who knew? The

last time we bought a sofa it was with

small children in mind: it had to be durable,

washable, utterly unbreakable. Now, twenty

years on, we’re looking for a sofa with a little

more pizzaz, a little more - dare I say - style,

and certainly with fewer stains. And with

all the other sofa customers in the country

seemingly on holiday, the furniture retailers

have been positively throwing sofas at us.

The big change in sofas since the last time

we were in the market for one has been the

advent of the corner sofa. It’s possible that

corner sofas were available in the old days, but

I have no recall of ever having seen one or sat

on one, and certainly not in the popular sofa-

cum-chaise-lounge stylee de jour. Over the

past few weeks I have been sitting on left-hand

corner sofas, right-hand corner sofas, velvet

corner sofas, woollen corner sofas, and every

other kind of corner and non-corner sofa

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Add free delivery, 5-25 year repair guarantees,

interest-free credit deals, and it’s almost as if

the sofa shops are giving their goods away.

It makes sense, of course: if you’re in the

furniture retail business, summer is always

going to be a bit of a challenge. Everyone’s

already spent - or are about to spend - their

money on their holidays, and the last thing

they’re going to want to do is buy the sofas

that you need to get rid of before you restock

for autumn and winter. In the sofa market,

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the sofa-selling business, you are going need

to provide your customers with some extra

incentive to buy. And if you’re in the sofa-

buying business, well, let the good times roll.

All of which got me thinking about the

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It’s what an economist might call a kind of

consumer arbitrage - using the principle

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or saving. Thus, rather than doing your

supermarket shop on a Saturday when

everyone else is doing their supermarket

shop, go just before closing time on a

weeknight when you might be able to take

advantage of some mark-downs. Why pay

£1.60 for a pot of chicken soup on Saturday

afternoon when you can pick it up for £1.

on Thursday night? (It was for this reason

my grandparents used to go to the market

at 5 o’clock on a Saturday, in order to buy

the broken biscuits and bruised bananas.)

Not having spent a lot of time sofa shopping

over the years I thought my once-in-twenty-

years purchase had perhaps revealed some

hitherto great undiscovered economic secret:

the Sansom Summer Sofa Principle. But of

course it turns out that there’s already a whole

movement of people taking advantage of these

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a man called Peter Adeney, a Canadian who

writes a popular blog under the name of Mr

Money Mustache (www.mrmoneymustache.

com). Mr Mustache and his wife retired from

their jobs as software engineers aged just 30,

having invested the majority of their income

in stock market index funds. He claims to draw

down just 4% of the value of his investment

fund every year, which provides enough

income for him and his family, as long as

they’re careful and frugal. Not surprisingly, Mr

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peak and out of hours: going on holiday when

other people are staying at home; working

when everyone else is resting; and generally

living counter-intuitively. ‘For me, the biggest

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Mr Mustache. ‘The aim is to question your

own daily activities and decide if and when

you really want to do them. Often the free

and uncrowded things are more rewarding

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So, I set out with the intention of buying

a cheap summer sofa, and have ended

up reevaluating the whole way I organise

my life: in the end, we decided the sofa

could wait. ‘That’s the last time I take you

sofa shopping,’ said my wife. Ah, well.

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Ian Sansom writes for the Guardian. He is the author of the County Guides and the Mobile

Library series of novels. His most recent book is December Stories I (No Alibis Press).

Finalist PPA Independent

Publisher Awards 2018-

Writer Of The Year

Illustration by

Jacky Sheridan

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