Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad has died
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
I was a lazy university student who just saw it as a part-time job though, just improving my economical situation for a bit but the few ideas I had was easily escalated and heard.
Kind of miss that place sometimes.
When it comes to Kamprads legacy, I do hope they open a fund with his pile of cash because for me, his legacy is stained by all the sketchy tax evasion schemes they've set up.
Rest in peace Ingvar.
I guess it’s worth saying that I don’t work for Ikea anymore so my words are my own and not affiliated with Ikea in any way.
Also, only someone with poor reading comprehension - whether through rushing or lack of focus - would have thought you still worked for Ikea, I appreciate you saying it for those people though. :)
As late as 2010 he hailed the Swedish fascist leader Per Engdahl[1][2].
He may have been an excellent business man (and tax evader), but please remembers these facts too.
[1] https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/nya-avslojanden-om-kampra...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_Engdahl
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Workers%27_...
``` The tycoon revealed some elements of his past in a book in 1988, admitting that he was a close friend of the Swedish fascist activist Per Engdahl, and a member of his New Swedish Movement between 1942 and 1945.
He said that his involvement was youthful "stupidity" and the "greatest mistake" of his life. ```
The 1988 “apology” was obviously just PR.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/nov/16/ikea-regret...
Shadowed by his Nazi roots which I never felt he apologized forcefully enough...
And the fact the incredibly shadowy ikea tax structure makes it hard for anyone to compete against. Profiles itself as a Swedish company and uses the country for marketing purposes but has done everything it could to avoid taxes here.
Also, the mountain of cash hidden in all the Dutch and Luxembourg trust funds coming from this tax structure is not being used to contribute back to society in a meaningful way like Gates and Buffett.
Not really an excuse, but at least since 1990s, that was very common among the European rich.
Psychologically, it's easy to justify: the state takes about half of your hard-earned cash, then passes it on to a bunch of bureaucrats in Brussels who have not done a damn thing in their lives. On the other hand, before everything became computerised, stashing the money in Luxembourg was way too easy.
Could also go with “social parasite” if we’re going more with political theory.
Kamprad should be very proud of what he built.
Not many business owners today start from the aspect of frugality like he did. IKEA is a place that targets everyone but is priced at middle class or lower levels unlike most products today. That goes back to his roots.
Mr Kamprad was renowned for his devotion to frugality, reportedly driving an old Volvo and travelling by economy class.
In a 2016 interview with Swedish television channel TV4, Mr Kamprad said that it was "in the nature of Småland to be thrifty".
"If you look at me now, I don't think I'm wearing anything that wasn't bought at a flea market," he said.
Far away from Sweden, on a Saturday night me and my wife were in line buying some sheets at IKEA for beds we just setup from IKEA, and it was bustling with massive lines. His products have massive reach.
IKEA is quite good at everything they do and are extremely efficient, except checkout on a Saturday but we grabbed some meatballs while waiting in line.
Fun fact: IKEA stands for Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd which is derived from founder's initials and hometown. [1]
The driving idea behind IKEA was, and is, that anyone should be able to afford stylish, modernist furniture. Kamprad felt he was not just cutting costs and making money, but serving the people as well. [1]
[1] https://sweden.se/business/ingvar-kamprad-founder-of-ikea/
What didn't change is the company focus, very middle class like Costco.
What didn't change is how the company was started, from frugality and internal innovation.
What didn't change is treating employees well as part of your business that directly affects consumers.
So yeah, he got mega wealthy and deserved it and earned those toys. But the company and mission never changed meanwhile many companies in that space folded or moved to focus on upper middle class or wealthy only. IKEA still has a Costo/Sears type of target market that is largely not pursued today. IKEA workers also love it like they do at Costco, WinCo and you can compare that to how Walmart treats retail workers (they treat devs well) in pay and how people feel in the organization. I prefer to spend money at places that treat employees well and pay well.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/how-ikea-founder-ingvar-kampr...
I’ve never heard anyone say that about a porsche.
Genuinely curious, not being facetious.
It used to be that if I wanted furniture, I'd go to the second hand store, and look for some used furniture that fitted my purpose. If I couldn't find something that worked, then I'd look online, and then failing that, I'd buy it new.
I found some real gems at the second hand store. A desk I bought is going strong 5 years later (I gave it to a friend).
Now I don't even bother, I just go straight to Ikea. It's so cheap that there's no point in looking at second hand.
In other words it is your own actions which will decide whether the presence of IKEA (et al) is detrimental, neutral or beneficial. It can be beneficial due to the economy of scale made possible by their concept but they do have a number of 'throwaway' products which can be seen as wasteful, although many of those products are made of recycled (fibreboard) or rest materials (hardboard) so the waste is more related to manufacturing, transport and disposal. The solution is just not to buy those products - or repair/reinforce them when they get damaged.
https://makezine.com/2013/04/20/enzo-maris-autoprogettazione...
So? Furniture of any quality can be found at second hand stores. From one of a kind expensive pieces to el cheapo ready to break stuff and everything in between.
That said, there's nothing much that can hurt a properly done desk. I have IKEA desks I use for 10 and 15 years now, and other than a few dents I've caused them, are perfectly fine.
Instead of getting second hand stuff, it's easier for me to just get new stuff from Ikea. But what's happening to all the second hand stuff that I would've bought? Does it all just go into the landfill? Because that's a waste.
the stuff you would've bought at near-Ikea prices won't be trashed, rather it will likely have to sell for slightly less. and the stuff that would've been that price will sell for slightly less, all the way down to some stuff that might've gone for a few dollars on craigslist will be given away for free. and the stuff that was only worth $0 will instead be trashed.
along the way, some folks of more limited means will be able to purchase slightly nicer furniture than if you'd gone and bought the nicest thing they could afford.
The last time I wanted to get rid of something very cheap I posted it online for people to pick it up for free. A few days later it was gone.
Ikea being a maze is really annoying when you just want to buy a few cups. Going to target or similar is about the same kind of furniture, for the same price, with a much faster experience.
> used furniture
All I read is
> bedbugs
And then my skin crawls.
Recently had a look at property listings, and both homes have been on the market recently, and both still have the kitchen I fitted 10 and 15 years ago, both still looking excellent.
As with most brands, they sell cheap throwaway things as well as more expensive, but that means that people who need furniture but would otherwise not be able to afford anything (unless they got everything 2nd hand) can furnish a home.
Easily fooled? No way that is solid oak. And for once that's a good thing, solid oak would warp, so you'd have to cross laminate it to counteract this. It's about 95% MDF with some veneer to make it look like wood. Yes it's heavy, but MDF is about as heavy as solid wood would be. The only way to get the kind of fit that makes it possible to assemble an IKEA product is to use what is called 'engineered' materials, a completely natural product would not work at that scale, there is just way too much variance. So even when IKEA does sell stuff that is made of wood throughout it will still be an engineered product. But the doors and drawer fronts of kitchen cabinets are not going to be cost effective that way so instead you get this MDF+surface coating solution, which for that application is ok.
The easiest place to verify this is where the hinges embed in the doors and the boreholes for the drawer to frame connection, there you can easily see that it is not solid wood.
I'm only slightly facetious - last few times I've planned to throw something away and had put it outside, a delivery person from somewhere or other asked if they could take it.
Chances are there are plenty of people in lower income jobs that'd love taking it off your hands.
It's an improvement though, when the threshold was putting a post in the newspaper, you probably wouldn't deal with it unless it was a 100 EUR return.
Although I'm sure the low prices encourage people to just throw it away rather than bother trying to sell it.
Recently sold 3 MALM dressers on Craigslist when I moved out of my last apartment. Recovered a little over half their value.
My current desk (MALM) was bought on Craiglist 4 years ago. Didn't have a car to get to IKEA. It's survived 4 years of use, and 3 moves.
They would certainly have to raise prices if they raised the quality, and then they lose their customers to competitors who are cheaper (and even worse quality - have you ever tried the cheap furniture from a hardware store?)
Furniture is a competitive market, and IKEA are very aggressive at undercutting their competition (they have directives to never let their competitors be cheaper) and they manage to sustain profits though their scale of operations (and some good engineering - IKEA have hollow tables filled with cardboard that's more durable than some competitors solid MDF stuff).
Basically people aren't willing to pay for quality. IKEAs trick is to be both cheap and have an acceptable level of design and quality.
On the low end, pretty much anything cheaper than IKEAs entry level is total garbage. I’m looking at you Target! That stuff is little better than a cardboard box.
On the high end, price rapidly outpaces quality. Every time I think “maybe I’ll get real furniture this time” the prices jump 10x. That’s just not worth it to me.
You can also order directly from places like etsy for other custom solid wood furniture around that price range: https://www.etsy.com/listing/268844007/mid-century-dining-ta...
And then they also have some decent, quality stuff, like some of their couches.
The problem is that as a consumer, it’s sometimes a bit unclear which category you’re buying into. Price is not a good indicator when it comes to ikea stuff: they have cheap stuff that’s great and expensive stuff that’s dispensible.
I'm sure virtually no other piece of hone furniture was ever designed to be taken apart. Iikea's stuff is designed to be easily shipped and put together by unskilled people, but not to be taken apart. I'm sure that you won't rate your cellphone or laptop by how well it handles being disassembled.
I do, personally - that's a pretty good proxy for how repairable/upgradeable it is.
(But yes, it's much less often that I need to repair or upgrade my furniture. :P)
Your comment reads as if it was a new experience and that you've never tried ikea yourself.
That said, a $10 piece of furniture is not going to have $100 worth of materials... But ikea makes more expensive pieces as well.
I don't think I've thrown away anything from ikea because it was end of life. (Part from <$1 kitchen peripherals).
You’re circling around the argument.
Here's my anecdata:
My desk is made by IKEA. It's sitting in front of me right now, having been disassembled, moved, and reassembled 5 times.
I had an IKEA bed that I got rid of a couple years ago. I ended up doing that by putting it on Craigslist and selling it for cash. I don't remember exactly how long it took, but the turnaround time for the whole thing was super fast.
That doesn't make any sense to me. Overall lifespan of the product is short - doesn't matter how many hands it changes! Eventually more IKEA products end up in the landfill. Think about it from a macro perspective.
Let's take an exemple:
- A coffee table that lasts 3 years from Ikea that has had 10 owners
- A coffee table that lasts 20 years from Room & Board that also has had 10 owners
Which one do you think is going to end up in the landfill faster? Doesn't matter if its resellability is high? At some point, it will fail and end up in the landfill.
However, you've now taken that (flawed) inference and are presenting it as the starting point—as if it were an axiom, rather than the very thing that is in contention.
A problem with the IKEA stuff is that it’s a) cheap, so little monetary value in that old table you don’t need any more - even if it’s still in perfect condition and b) A prospective buyer can buy a new one (still cheap) and the new one is trivial to transport home compared to the used one that needs some disassembly.
So being cheap obviously makes it thrown away a lot - regardless of quality. You don’t hesitate to throw out something that wasn’t expensive, and prospective buyers always have the option of buying new.
They keep lowering prices and people think their products are cheap and poorly made.
In reality the quality is comparable to furniture 2-3 times the price.
Most of IKEAs wood comes from Europe/Russia. They also probably do a lot more work tracing the source of their wood and making it sustainable than your average furniture maker, simply due to their visibility. You might be better off with something hand-crafted by an artisan from local wood, but who can afford that? Most people get their furniture from other big box stores, with unknown provenance
The phrase "waste in transit" is so good. Once you have it, and viscerally understand the idea of things sitting on store shelves which you will briefly take into your house before their inevitable journey to landfill... yeah, you will never look at the world the same way.
But overall ikea are not the problem. They have corporate responsibility officers and like hippies who sold out and all kinds of things going on to ensure that the kind of social media disaster you discussed is supposed to never happen. Plus a lot of those people actually care.
Shoot back with interesting evidence of ikea corporate crimes if you have any though.
There are a few things to attack the company on; I’m not sure sustainability is one of their weak points.
They plan fast-growing pine trees. Those trees remove carbon dioxide from the air. They chop down the trees and make furniture. The carbon is now locked up in that furniture. If they furniture goes into a landfill, that carbon could stay there for decades (or more?). Then, they plant some more trees.
I don't actually know whether building lots of cheap furniture is actually better for climate change compared to building small quantities of durable furniture.
But it's an interesting thought experiment and a reminder to check your facts and do your sums before spouting off.
Take a desk that contains 30 kg of wood material. 50 % of that is carbon, so there is 15 kg of carbon in it, corresponding to 60 kg of CO2, which is emitted by driving 400 km with a medium-sized car (150 g/km). That much is first contained by the material (even in landfill), and eventually released back to atmosphere.
At least you shouldn't do a lot of transporting this desk back and forth. IKEAs logistics from manufacture to store is remarkably efficient.
For example, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates have both pledged to give away the vast majority of their fortunes. Jeff Bezos is now making plans for his philanthropy. This happens in Europe too, but is less common.
I was looking to see if there were any specific plans for Mr. Kamprad’s wealth, but unfortunately did not see anything.
We believe more in structuring society, government, welfare, healthcare, funding, etc, such that they're not needed.
>Much has been written about IKEA's remarkably effective retail formula. The Economist has investigated the group's no less astonishing finances.
>What emerges is an outfit that ingeniously exploits the quirks of different jurisdictions to create a charity, dedicated to a somewhat banal cause, that is not only the world's richest foundation, but is at the moment also one of its least generous. The overall set-up of IKEA minimises tax and disclosure, handsomely rewards the founding Kamprad family and makes IKEA immune to a takeover. And if that seems too good to be true, it is: these arrangements are extremely hard to undo. The benefits from all this ingenuity come at the price of a huge constraint on the successors to Ingvar Kamprad, the store's founder (pictured above), to do with IKEA as they see fit.
Lack of philanthropic giving in Europe is not due to a lack of wealth, but due to a desire for dynasty.
This may be true for small- to mid-sized fortunes, but not for the really large ones. Ikea in particular is a counter-example for this. They operate a super-tight network of companies, funds and trusts in multiple countries apart from Sweden like the Netherlands and some off-shore tax paradises and perform any possible trick, including the usual fake self-licensing tactics, to reduce their tax burden to next-to-nothing.
The difference to Amazon and Co. is mostly that Ikea is privately-owned, thus you can't simply invest some money in them to at least reap some of the profits of these tactics for yourself. The profits all pile up in private vaults of the owner, which is basically the Kamprad family (with exact ownership stakes being unknown of course, another difference from the publicity requirements that public companies are required to meet).
ID 498407
http://newsroom.inter.ikea.com/gallery/image/ingvar-kamprad/...
That I can buy furniture and kitchen tools is a nice bonus.
Rest in pieces.
And if he didn't talk about it in that way, we'd probably have forgotten about it long ago. Ironic.
It's crazy how he ran Ikea for over 70 years but a quarter of the article deals with his ties to Nazis. Granted, he admits it was the "greatest mistake" of his life, so I suppose the attention to it may not be unwarranted. But I think it would have been prudent to touch on what caused him to shift his perspective. "Youthful stupidity" doesn't convey much.
Still, I can't help but feel like the information age is ushering in a modern-day version of the Akashic records. A double-edged sword anyone with an internet connection can consult. We laud past failures as learning experiences when it comes to startups, almost as if it's a badge of honor. But it's a very different story when someone violates a social contract, even in retrospect. (Albeit there are plenty of cases where people are embraced because of the drastic changes they made in their life, e.g. gang members that become speakers for at-risk youth.)
I think there's both a wisdom, and ignorance, of crowds/culture. And these crowds are constantly redrawing the line of who deserves redemption. Lately, the line seems to be inching in the wrong direction in my opinion.
With the advent of the internet it's scary to think about how efficiently the arbiters of information control the narrative. "We do not judge men by what they are in themselves, but by what they are relatively to us." -Madame Swetchine.
At 17 I was, politically speaking, a dumbass. Like most children that age. Not that I even had any identifiable political view that was in any way expressed, but I didn't know shit about politics.
Today it is even worse since every kid is supposed to have opinions on everything, grows up having a semi-public persona while still being afflicted by the stupidity and naivety of a mind that has been barely usable for a handful of years.
I think "youthful stupidity" covers it plenty much.
There’s also Porsche, Volkswagen (basically, Hitler’s own brand) and any other brands that were involved, and basically the catholic church was preaching in many EU countries for their sons to join the German army...
This is also one of the reasons there were so many 'collaborators' in belgium - a very Catholic country at the time - , while in fact the main goal was to get rid of the French dominance.
But if you're interested in the topic, Google what the Vatican did those days.
I for one am not about to forgive or forget. Mind you, the Church wasn’t the only group helping the rats escape a noose.
All of these are still around and were much more involved than Ingvar Kamprad was at the time.
Going with the tide? I doubt if the Nazis had won there would have been any shifts in perspective.
(That said, after some time, things should be forgiven anyway. No much reason to punish a 90 year old today for when he did when he was a Nazi as 18-20 years old -- as sometimes happens).
All governments do good and bad things and it's important to judge them in that context. What separated the Italian fascists from the German fascists was not necessarily obvious at the time. Further, while history reasonably judges German connections harsher, that's filtered through both bias and information people simply did not have.
It’s possibly right that there is not much use in blaming the opportunists of the time, mostly because there were to many to punish them all. But there also were a significant number who risked or lost their lives in opposition, and this “history is written by the winners” cynicism does more to besmirch the latter, than it absolves the former.
(Am german, have asked grandparents the tough questions)
So, yes the Nazi party line had some frightening implications, but at the time you could easily assume some basic human decency would prevent what actually happened.
To use a recent example many people assume Trump is saying things he does not actually mean. A friend said "Wait he actually wants to build a wall, but that's stupid."
So, my argument is people are willing to overlook implications when they agree with other things you are saying. We often look for the worst of our enemies and ignore what our allies are doing.
Further, this has real word implications and we need to be more careful than simply assume we will know if we are placed in a similar situation.
<3 <3 Ikea is life
Fortunately it really isn't. It is ok, mostly single use stuff that seems to be cheap but that is actually quite expensive if you take into account the material costs and the production quality. Even so, their sticker price and economies of scale put almost everybody competing with them out of business.
(a) ikea
(b) stuff generally of lower quality than ikea and in my subjective opinion far worse design, for somewhat more money.
(c) very good quality and design, but extremely expensive; 2000 euro and up for a sofa.
Literally all the furniture in my house is ikea, as a result.
Altogether this is one of the worst things about Ikea furniture, that and the over reliance on honeycomb cardboard filled surfaces making solid looking sidewalls anything but.
Perhaps it's a bigger problem if you try to move out of historic house with winding narrow stairs. Just moved houses here without disassembling anything but the largest pieces like sofa sets. All my furniture including IKEA pieces made it just fine.
As is most furniture?
- Selling to the next renter or to the landlord
- Finding a buyer (individual or store) and arranging with them to pick it up on the day you're moving out
- Selling your stuff a few days before leaving and improvising temporary alternatives (e.g. $20 air mattress on the floor, or staying with friends)
Note: I'm not saying these are better than just writing off your current furniture and buying new stuff. All I'm saying is that other options existed before IKEA, and continue to exist today.
Living in Sweden I've bought quite the number of IKEA furniture, and to this day none has failed. What has been thrown out ( or sold ) has been stuff I got bored with, didn't fit a new apartment, or similar.
There has been missing bolts, goods damaged during transportation etc, some of them really annoying, but all furniture has held together longer than I wanted to keep them.