IKEA Effect
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
The more upmarket version of this is buying antique (or vintage) furniture at auction. The hunt to find the "perfect" piece makes the attachment so much stronger when you actually get it.
Plus this second-hand hunt is much more rewarding than zombie-strolling through an Ikea store.
Robert Cialdini, in his famous book - "Psychology of persuasion", talks about an extreme version of such an effect in the case of Fraternities and Hazing where the members of fraternities display a greater commitment and respect towards their respective fraternity even though they might have had to go through a harsh and humiliating initiation process.
In this sense, IKEA effect, "find" effect, "my kid is the best" effect etc can all be traced to a common ancestor phenomena.
Rather, that's a far more important factor when it comes to charity shop / thrift shop, or the more expensive version as you mentioned: antique/vintage shop or auction.
> Researchers then priced the items the experimenters had assembled as well as pre-assembled IKEA furniture. The results showed that the subjects were willing to pay 63% more for the former than for the latter.
And it's clearly not rational. As long as you assign positive value to your time.
If time has positive value, then so do objects with time invested in them.
I mean unless assembling it is something that you really enjoy doing. So much that you want to pay extra for that pleasure.
I would say it is hard to live a good life if you don't value the things you create.
It is interesting to see that people weren't able to predict this behavior. However, people are unable to predict many of their own behaviors, so that isn't a damning result by itself.
Apparently, sales went up because adding fresh eggs to the mix simply produced superior cakes — http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/cakemix.asp
Oh look, the new platform is coming along great, all glory to kanban.
Bigger pieces like big cupboards can be more fragile, but nearly any other brand would also be fragile - except maybe massive wood pieces, very heavy and not able to be dissassembled, and very expensive by comparisson.
And one thing about them...they are generally much lighter than solid wood "real" furniture - so the actual process of moving them is easier and generally less prone to damage in the first place.
It was the lowest priced sofa at the time (~100€), and my elbow went right through the armrest on the third day. It felt like it was made of cardboard. Helpful as a temporary consumable, and probably extremely recyclable.
> And one thing about them...they are generally much lighter than solid wood "real" furniture - so the actual process of moving them is easier and generally less prone to damage in the first place.
Both weight and (dis)assembly are a great thing indeed: I mostly have IKEA furniture, mainly because the staircase leading to my apartment is crazy steep and tight!
It might've been, some of their desks are made like this: http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/images/gb-img-fy15/ikea-board-on-f...
I don't believe they are supposed to, in spite of the romantic marketing spin around the whole "he saw the legs off the table" shtick. They are, however, designed to be easily transported throughout the whole logistic chain up to the customer's home and to be easily assembled by everyone without specialized tools. However, some pieces of furniture require destructive build steps that aren't supposed to ever be undone, such as driving nails onto cardboard parts or driving wood screws onto particle board components, and the end result isn't exactly ready to be shipped across town in the back of a moving truck.
IKEA is just rudimentary assembly. You don't have to reshape any material in IKEA assembly. You don't have to follow any blueprint to cut or drill anything out of raw stock. If you have any sort of skill and tools for that sort of thing, they lie idle.
There was the one time I had to re-drill holes that were off. My already low regard for the item sank as a result.
However, when you're an engineer and build things daily, it's more of a nuisance than a joy.
That's kind of the "IKEA effect", but I don't see how you can get it from putting together a few mass produced IKEA parts. There is just about zero room to put any "you" into it.
That's not necessarily true. Depending on how invested you are into an IKEA lifestyle there is plenty of reshaping and customizing going on :)
Source: I buy IKEA for years now and did plenty of modifications and customizations.
You most likely just don't reach this level of effort needed when assembling IKEA furniture.
In regards to the egg in the instant mix (pancakes, cakes, etc), this is mentioned in Adam Curtis' 'The Century of the Self'[1], which is a fantastic documentary, and definitely worth a watch.
And replacing the missing or I'll fitting part is always more difficult than originally buying it. Plus the whole delayed gratification thing.
I do enjoy the end result though. Even though I know in reality I've done no great thing. :) But then I just sit down an write a program, and I feel better. :)
OTOH I build electronic devices and program them even though I could buy something similar in a shop.
So I guess it comes down to what is interesting for whom, and it will wildly depend on the individual.
It's not inexpensive to have your lawn cut and the quality isn't always to my liking. But I've found the tradeoff to be worthwhile.
That, and I like the design. Most of the stuff my parents and grandparents had, with turned legs and curves, was a real turnoff.
What I want from furniture is something that does it's job without calling attention to itself.
Means people on modest incomes can get decent enough furniture.
Unlike an IKEA set, there's no full list of parts to buy, you don't have a guide, it's not guaranteed that the parts work well together (even for someone with experience) and mis-assembly can render the whole thing useless.
What I learned is that there is nothing special about a homebuilt PC, unless you want an odd case. Thanks to depreciation, there's not all that much special about OTR PC's, either.
* Properly sized cooling that keeps my PC silent under any kind of load. (I have to admit, Dell et al. have made decent progress there too, but that's mostly thanks to the great improvements in power management we've seen in the past decade).
* Optimal budget allocation.
* Exotic features (for instance, I built my current computer 2½ years ago, and there was only one mainboard on the market providing HDMI 2.0 with the Skylake iGPU).
If I weren't so cheap, I guess I would just order all the parts from a single store and pay for assembly.
Now, when it comes to recommending a computer to my family, I just tell them to buy a NUC/Brix.
To the broader point, they do make the store something of an experience which works especially well because there are relatively few stores so it's a bit of an expedition for many people to go to one.
I think I'm just too used to IKEA furniture.
I don't get why so many people hate assembling things.
http://hijinksensue.com/comic/a-prison-for-college-kids-and-...
For me, the effect is somehow even reversed: I try to avoid IKEA as hard as I can because I feel assembling the items is not the worth the time.
EDIT: I see, there has been some silliness in adding pictures here in the history
So I could turn the boring police station into a spaceship.
And the fire station into another spaceship.
And the indigo tropical island set into an alien world.
Then medical building, the random pirate lair, the galleon and the random 18th century fort into a pirate spaceship.
And then I'd dismantle the lot and make a gigantic mega-spaceship, with a diverse crew of police officers, pirates, Imperial British soldiers, island tribespeople, and firemen.
---------
Fast-forward to today: I assemble the IKEA furniture my partner wants, but I can't exactly get creative with it.
Oh, and since I'm commenting now, I will add that I also feel no attachment to the IKEA crap I assemble and the eponymous "effect" probably does exist, but should have been named differently.
I often wonder if electronics and mechanics shouldn't be done the same. So much is wasted from misuse and repairshop abuse from ignorance.
The effect doesn't really mean that you are going to attach a lot of value to a 9-dollar table you mounted yourself. It means you're going to attach more value to it than if you had bought the same table already assembled.
More like procrastinating with the pieces sitting inside the ikea box until I really need to put the thing together.
Or to put it differently is there a real difference between building something and assembling something out of a kit-set?