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.
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.
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.
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
There are a few things to attack the company on; I’m not sure sustainability is one of their weak points.
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.
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.