Patio furniture in south Africa is put to much greater use than it is in other countries, this frequency of use coupled with the fact that South Africans are pretty big people is the reason that patio furniture needs to be more strictly tested, in terms of what the load-bearing abilities of the furniture are. Every South African can share a few stories about patio furniture that has not been pressure tested, and at least one of those stories will involve a big aunty who had a little too much to drink and would refuse to heed the warning about the patio furniture.
Every person at the braai could see that the aunty was way too big to even be looking at that patio furniture, she needed to look at the heavy wrought iron stuff, but she wanted the armrests that came with the plastic patio furniture. This was never going to have a happy ending for the aunty or the patio furniture or the poor uncle who had to walk away from his giggling mates to untangle his wife from the patio furniture, instead, it ends with some very sad faces on the aunty and uncle, while the offending piece of patio furniture lies on the ground in tatters waiting to be thrown into the bin.
Not every story that tells of patio furniture destruction has to involve humiliating an overweight relative but sadly someone always walks away from a good patio furniture story feeling a bit shy, if not embarrassed. This is why the patio furniture needs to undergo much stricter testing because, surely, if so many different people all share a similar patio furniture story then it cannot be the usual excuse that the factories always give, when some poor aunty actually takes them to task for their poor workmanship, the one that goes on about how it was just fluke and the chairs are really well made and carefully tested before going anywhere near the shop. People need to stand up for their rights and not just settle for this inferior patio furniture, especially because people in South Africa use it so much.