Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

You are going to read a lot of mixed reviews about this product. I suppose you could call this media cabinet by Atlantic a "hit" or "miss" product. For me, this was a huge miss. I wasted 90 minutes of my time with this piece of junk -- 70 minutes to put together and 20 minutes to dismantle to put back in the box and return it to Amazon. Decades ago, I used to work in a video store. One of my jobs was putting together video furniture. There were always two types of furniture we would provide for our customers.....expensive and cheap. You got to know the manufacturers and how consistently well or poorly constructed their furniture was. Back in the day, one of my favorite manufacturers was SAUDER. However, you paid a premium for their storage cabinets. Right out of the box, I could tell immediately that this company's product was crud. You could see the signs of badly constructed pressboard. Still, I knew what I was getting into when I shelled out a mere $70 for this elaborate shelving system. I opted to go cheap, and I ended up paying the price. The one good thing I can say about Atlantic is that they labeled all their pieces. However, even with that feat accomplished, I ended staring at the instructions for minutes on end trying to figure out how this went together......that is, until I realized, they forgot to include page #3 of the stapled instructions. So, off to the Internet I went and downloaded their instruction manual .pdf. As I examined the shelves I could see defects in the workmanship. There was warping in the pressed wood. As I inserted and turned screws, the brown coating started coming off of the press board. An hour into the construction, I found that the locking system would not properly align --- no matter how many times I gently forced the screws into the wood. The entire bottom section of the cabinet had a sizeable gap because it would not properly align and lock into the upper system. Here's a perfect example of how badly designed this case is.... The holes for the wooden dowels are too big. The dowels do not fit tightly in the holes. They should. After all, these are pivotal pieces of guiding hardware that connect the parts together. Instead, the dowels just sit there loose. They fall out all over the place when you connect the shelves together. The round locking mechanisms don't always lock properly. So, now you have sections of shelving that are wobbling because they can't properly be secured. In all the years I have been putting together furniture like this, I have never seen something so poorly conceived as this shelving unit. The final straw came when I turned it over, in an attempt to nail the backing into the shelf. I could see a huge chunk of pressboard had just become loose on the side. I have included a photo below. There is no way something like that can be covered up. I then had to spend the next 20 minutes unscrewing and dismantling the entire cabinet. I contacted Amazon and have started the return process. Dear reader, I know you will be tempted to buy this cabinet because the picture looks nice and there are more than a few reviews from people who are happy with their purchase. If you want some advice from someone that has put together dozens of these kind of shelving systems over his lifetime -- and knows the good stuff from bad --- then please stay away from this piece of junk. There's bad furniture companies and then a step down from them is Atlantic. I have never seen such an awful product --- from build quality to the mere fact that you can't even properly align and screw this thing together. The sole purpose of this company selling this product is to make a quick buck off customers who want cheap furniture. Do yourself a favor and spend a little more money. What that will do is give you less heartache during construction, and, a nicer-looking piece of furniture in the end. These are the kind of products you learn from. By that I mean, you learn never to go cheap -- and if you do, you are taking chances of either getting something that will work for you or hours of wasted time. Brands to consider: Sauder, Venture House. Spend a little more money and get something that will make you happy.