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Comment by lnsru | Hacker News Reader

It’s a seriously evil plan. Used old IKEA furniture was made from wood and had some level of quality. These things could last decades. Current new things there are made from paper!!! I manage to damage these new things while assembling. New IKEA things can’t be moved, because assembling and disassembling them does not work anymore. It’s a great decision to destroy old used things, so they disappear from secondary market and IKEA can sell more of the paper trash.

Edit: paper furniture isn’t new and secret. Old article about it: https://gizmodo.com/and-now-ikea-is-making-sofas-out-of-pape...

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> Current new things there are made from paper!!!

Another point of view: the IKEA cardboard honeycomb material is AWESOME!

It's made from recycled material, it doesn't weigh anything, it's very strong when compared to weight and price, the surface is pretty resilient and it doesn't produce a lot of waste when it is inevitably discarded.

In today's single use culture (which needs to go away) it would be a terrible waste of resources to use nice hardwood to build cheap coffee tables that get swapped out when the fashion changes.

You can still get hardwood furniture that will last several lifetimes. It will make you feel a little lighter in the pocket, but you buy once and cry once.

I have another perspective: kids.

With ikea a kid can get his own setup, brand new and age appropriate.

Princess or racecar bed when they're young. bed with a desk underneath when they're getting to homework age, full sized bed when they reach 90th percentile. All with matching extras, and not too much money.

By the way, have you noticed the price and quality of furniture store furniture (when they're not "going out of business"?) A lot of it is either 10x ikea price or only 4x but still made with fiberboard underneath.

If only IKEA furniture didn't had a history of killing children because they don't meet furniture stability standard. Here's a couple stories from this year and before then.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/06/us/ikea-dresser-lawsuit-s...

https://www.newsweek.com/why-are-these-ikea-dressers-killing...

and many many more

A lot of specialist children's toy and furniture companies have recalled deadly products. This isn't an Ikea-specific problem. Checking for recall notices before buying a product, and registering with the manufacturer to receive future notices is the wisest course of action.

If you buy a desk top made out of this honeycomb crap, if you put any weight on the desk top (e.g. sometimes rest your elbows there), be prepared to throw it out after a couple years - the whole surface will over time heavily deform under weight and will no longer be flat.

You're either unlucky or exaggerating. I've had cardboard honeycomb furniture for years and years with no major degradation.

If the surface coating gets damaged or the surface gets pierced or it becomes waterlogged from spills or environmental humidity, it will quickly go bad. But they're pretty resilient to normal household use.

You get what you pay for. A LACK honeycomb table costs 7€. What can you expect at this price?

> You're either unlucky or exaggerating.

I think I was neither, as I repeated it three times and always got the same result (I was moving every couple of years, so I threw out the crooked desk top when moving and bought identical one in a new place). Eventually, I stopped getting those $40 honeycomb desk tops and got a wooden one, from IKEA as well (made not from solid wood, but from sort of glued together mosaic of small wood pieces, don't know what it's called) for around $100, which is still good as new after 8 years of usage.

I think expecting a $40 piece of furniture to survive multiple moves is unrealistic on your part. You get what you pay for, and $40 for a desk that makes it through even 2 residences is $20/location for a desk which is ridiculously cheap.

It wasn't a desk, just a desk top (i.e. a flat rectangular surface, 150cm x 70cm x 5cm IIRC). You screwed legs to it (sold separately), and thus had a simplest possible desk. Also, I agree that it was cheap, but it was a piece of furniture that has already shown signs of wear after a year and was ready for landfill after 3 years of usage. Under Polish law, I could probably successfully sue IKEA for selling me faulty product, because I could reasonably argue in court that no furniture, no matter how cheap, should be expected to last only 3 years. I mean, desks are not socks.

The only way I damaged it was with a double screen clamp. I find the honeycomb amazing, bought my huge desk 35€ while I was a student, and the only thing that damaged it was the double screen arm clamp that damaged the surface of the desk.

Same experience here, funny coincidence.

This nails my annoyance with going from low-middle income with generations old stuff to $200k/yr rich and with a sense for getting stuff that will last (relative value), to homeless where people want to throw cheap garbage at me. Silver lining is I’m unbreakable and persistent, so my sales skills are improving in order to eat and hold to that (eg. Justifying $9 tacos as 45 mins of min wage work and vs. $9 of comparable Taco Bell both vegan), and most of the stuff has lasted insanely long relative to wear, to like cents per use.

IKEA’s quality hasn’t changed. This is just a typical example of selection bias. Of course the old IKEA furniture that still is around is of better quality than those that aren’t. They sold cardboard furniture 30 years ago too, it’s just that most of it isn’t around anymore, and the thirty year old furniture that still is around is the pieces that are of better quality.

It sounds like you're describing survivorship bias.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

Yes, that is a more precise term that I should have used. On the other hand, I’d argue that survivorship bias is a type of selection bias.

I've got one specific example, where I know the quality has changed. I've bought the same modelf of sofa about 10 years apart. Ikea has done some serious value engineering. Both sofas look very similar from outside, but they are in fact very different. The newer frame appears to be somehwhat lighter, yet sturdier at the same time. The cushions however are now lighter and far less comfortable. They obviously spend a lot of effort into making everything more efficient and cost effective - some of it at a slight cost in perceived quality.

I should have written that the overall quality hasn’t changed. A lot of products have changed, in one way or another, but the overall quality isn’t worse than it used to be.

I think it has. It is a subjective judgement but they used to have more products that were of higher grade than they do now. As an example, my parents had a garden table bought about 10-15 years ago. They now bought another one, very similar but still not. The finish was less exact, and the entire impression a step down. With the tables next to each other, very easy to see which is better made.

But you can find examples where the shift has gone the other way too. They have always, and still have, a range of qualities. We just bought a pair of armchairs that seems to be quite solidly built and with nice material and finish, but I also had to throw away some kitchen chairs after just few years that we bought in 2010 because they were falling apart. In my experience, even pieces that has the same name can change from year to year (in either direction quality wise), because they have found a way to rationalise the manufacturing further or found a different factory that will produce it slightly cheaper but with slightly different standards.

I think by trying to find evil in their scheme you miss the pretty obvious business logic:

- IKEA will only accept things in decent-ish condition and will (if necessary) refurbish and resell them.

- you get a voucher, not cash

So an assumption that they try to kill the second hand market seems absurd - on the contrary they become a marketplace for good-condition second hand products AND get people into the store with a voucher in hand (which means they might spend even more to buy something and like many vouchers may also end up unclaimed).

So no nefariousness here, just good business sense. Nonetheless having used options in the store, allowing you to decide to take that shelf new for 130 or that used one for 70 seems to me as a net gain for everyone.

This does look like it could kill the second-hand market, though. A voucher ties you to spending it on more IKEA, and if enough people exchange their used furniture for vouchers instead of selling it themselves, it'll discourage people from looking for the used furniture outside of IKEA - seeing second-hand IKEA furniture on sale you'll be asking yourself whether it's a lemon, because if it wasn't, then presumably the owner would sell it back to IKEA instead.

"Good business sense" seems to rarely correlate with benefits for society these days, so it's wise to be skeptical.

> then presumably the owner would sell it back to IKEA instead.

Why? If you get a better price in the second hand market and someone will pick it up from your home, why would you sell it back to Ikea.

The hassle of listing stuff on Craigslist or your local equivalent? Especially at the moment, a quick guaranteed transaction at a reputable place sounds a lot more appealing than having some random come over (or flake out), anguish over whether they actually want to buy or not, and maybe try to negotiate price on something you've already listed for $15.

Exactly. My wife and I are big into reuse, trying to donate, give away or sell all the things someone could use, instead of throwing them away. Experience is varied. Sometimes we do wish the process wouldn't have to involve dealing with actual people. We've been literally told to commit suicide, only because we didn't have time to make more photos of a thing freely given away, over the ones we posted on the group. Also, putting even a ridiculously small price tag on something not only doesn't scare problem people away - it brings out more of them.

The kind of people who tend to buy furniture first hand don't tend to like having to interact with the kind of people who tend to buy furniture (let alone cheap furniture) second hand if you catch my drift.

Also convenience.

With very rare exceptions, I can't be bothered selling used stuff these days. I'd much rather just put something out for someone to take away or take a reduced amount for a no-hassle transaction like selling to Amazon.

It looks more like being an attempt at getting a slice of the second-hand market and not to kill it.

They are nefarious. They lower the price of umbrellas when it rains!

They still have the real wooden furniture though. You don't have to buy the cheap paper ones.

And they make it very clear what things are made of in the meterials section. Most retailers don't

Same model of Kallax shelf now is made from paper. Price is even higher. I have older wooden models. The new one has even slightly different size. I was taken by surprise.

Kallax was never made from "wood". The new one is quite study particle board filled with honey comb paper, the old one was very thin MDF with carton spacers. I have both an old expedit and a new kallax and there is no noticable difference. The main downfall of both is the coating with is thin and easy to destroy.

Obviously I bought something else than IKEA product some 15 years ago. It was 5x5 huge wooden shelf. Had problems to lift parts of it and sold later for more than I paid. Deal of lifetime!

Expedit and Kallax have different size, German description: https://new-swedish-design.de/de/blog/expedit-vs.-kallax-reg...

> Expedit and Kallax have different size

Yes, but Kallax is IKEA's official replacement for Expedit.

The predecessor of Kallax was also made from paper (and it was called Expedit). I know because I hade to saw it apart to be able to lug it to the recycling.

I strongly disagree with this assessment. IKEA does not benefit from non lasting furniture since you can get it swapped if it breaks. I bought a lot of furniture recently when we moved into our flat and a lot of non IKEA furniture we bought had issues very quickly, even expensive one.

I tend to think of Ikea as high end crap furniture. It's made mostly of the same components as all of the other crap furniture but it's generally had enough engineering and testing put into it that you can be sure it's strong enough for what you want it to do.

As an aside, if you ever buy the same piece of Ikea furniture a few years later it's interesting to see what has been changed.

As a bit of a hobbyist wood worker, Ikea furniture is slightly soul destroying. It's often more expensive to buy the wood stock materials than it is to buy the finished Ikea piece.

> It's often more expensive to buy the wood stock materials than it is to buy the finished Ikea piece.

Well, yes, we're back to supply chains here; just as on digikey you might find that the unit price for 1x an item is twice the unit price for 100x or even 10x, the supply chain to bring you a tiny quantity of wood to enjoy the premium experience of being a craftsman is quite expensive compared to anything mass-produced. You are paying for the experience of making it yourself.

(And this is before we get into relative wood pricing between countries; it took me a long time to understand why America had all those wood-framed and paneled houses while they're virtually absent in the UK, and of course it's because the local old forests were depleted in previous centuries. To the point where there was a whole pre-20th century peasant architecture of stone houses with only a single piece of serious lumber in: the roof beam.)

Absolutely, it doesn't make it any less soul destroying to understand the logic of it though!

You may well be right about the reason traditional British houses are made of stone and brick. However, if you watch a new build house going up you may well be surprised to see that the structure of the house is entirely wood framed (often mostly off site). The floors and the roof are all held up by the wood framework. A brick facade is then installed and tied into the wood framework.

Depends on the country. It's a reinforced concrete structure( including floors) where I live and double brick walls with insulation between them here. We have lots of sand so concrete is relatively cheap. I have literally never seen a single house made out of wood here and I have been to a lot of construction sites.

I found that if you're the type of person that likes to customize their furniture then IKEA is a good starting point. Both for the choices of material and because a lot of stuff is compatible.

A big reason most of our (non custom made) furniture is IKEA is because it strikes a pretty ideal balance between price and quality and allows you to "get to town" with changes. Most other "crap furniture" does not at all support such modifications to it. For starters because some of the things we bought even though they said solid wood on the label did not actually fully consist of solid wood and were useless after cutting off a piece.

if you ever buy the same piece of Ikea furniture a few years later it's interesting to see what has been changed

We have the 'same' dresser bought three times in three different years. The first one is pretty solid wood, the second one is more particle board, but still decent, the newest one is much flimsier and much more lightweight particle board and is actually falling apart while the two older ones are still going strong.

On the other hand, I understand that customising/"hacking" Ikea products is also something of a thing.... e.g. https://www.ikeahackers.net

> As a bit of a hobbyist wood worker, Ikea furniture is slightly soul destroying. ...

Don’t tell me about it. I built an Enzo Mari bookshelf and afterwards realised I had built an IKEA Ivar but spent the double price in wood.

I disagree. I bought a lot of Ikea things over the past 5-10 years and it ages nicely (except for garden chairs and tables stored outside). Of course I never tried to disassemble it (why would I), but I disagree that quality is shoddy.

Quality is pretty good if you stay away from the economy white stuff. That gets chipped, wears quickly and gets dirty easily

On the other hand, it costs like $20 so you can't exactly expect it to be made of hardwood =)

True. Most of my living room is made out of the paper stuff. The non white laminates are pretty good.

Counter-anecdote: I had a wardrobe which lasted seven years and two house moves (i.e. three houses) very well, before being sold on to a new home a few months ago, in pretty decent condition.

Probably depends what you buy. If you buy the cheap-as-chips stuff, you get wha you pay for.

that's not a counter anecdote - they said the old stuff would last, the new not.

Is there any evidence that the new stuff is worse? Because as far as I can tell, the wardrobes at IKEA today is the exact same models as the ones I bought 7 years ago. Billy bookshelves looks to be the same as the one I bought 15 years ago.

Billy definitely got worse over the last 30 years. We’ve got some from the nineties that are much more wood-like than what they sell today, still going strong.

They look the same, but the actual construction grade on the new Billys is awful. I bought a bookcase two years ago and the wood veneer has already chipped off, revealing the cardboard inside. Even the more expensive stuff isn't immune - I purchased a Malm at the same time and the drawers already have the bottoms gone and the metal frame parts have already bent.

> that's not a counter anecdote - they said the old stuff would last, the new not.

I would like to see some evidence on this. I read this all the time and it does not reflect my experiences.

Interesting... wasn't aware that 7 years was 'old' in Ikea terms!

IKEA stuff isn't BIFL grade, it's mostly affordable starter furniture.

I bought my first house a few years ago and started to look for more serious furniture. I spent months looking for a good cabinet for my TV + consoles + storage, but could't find anything. I buckled and went for an ikea setup in the end, using their design tool to come up with something really neat and affordable. I mean yeah it's particle board, but it looks good and will be just fine for the next ten years.

My Galant desk is probably over 10 years old at this point. Still just fine; only thinking of replacing it because I want a standing desk now that I am WFH for the foreseeable future. Sure, the top is that cheap paper stuff, but it’s been broken down and assembled 7 times due to moving and survived just fine.

Why would you need a furniture that lasts decades if: - it is expensive - it doesn't match the design in ~5 years

People now want to be able to afford new furniture every 5-10 years, cardboard one is not the issue if it is designed to look good.

Minority of people would buy furniture 10x expensive that lasts 10x longer then the cardboard one (I wouldn't).

you don't change the design so often...my parents have the same furniture for more than 35 years now. It's an house, not a website

My parents-in-law changed their furniture 10 years ago, previous change was when they moved into the house, which was 30 earlier. And they now talk about changing it again, modern times force people to change clothes, furniture sooner than it was few decades ago.

I would- but that being said, I also just built a 2'x4' desk out of A piece of pre-cut grade A plywood and used some 2x4's that I cut for legs- and side supports- at a local makerspace. Total cost was about $45, not including the membership, and it's my desk that I can do whaveter I want with. I absolutely would spend the extra money on something that lasts 10 times longer, because that generally means that I won't have to replace it, or can resell it when I do.

That being said, I'm not super into fast fashion / 'influencer culture', either, so maybe I'm in the minority here?

Do we really need to exchange the furniture to match current trends? IKEA basically invented fast fashion for furniture, but we don't have to operate that way. Not to mention that is highly unsustainable.

The cheapest IKEA-stuff is indeed cheap, but buy stuff somewhat over that and they are still really durable.

In my perception the line is not so much a cheap/less cheap distinction than going roughly perpendicular to the novelty axis, separating fashionable from timeless. It's as if product management would intuitively combine short-lived aesthetics with short-lived materials. Maybe they know from the beginning which new releases are merely novelty and which are intended to become permanent fixtures in the programme?

It would make sense on many business levels (e.g. I'd image negative impact of flimsyness growing almost exponentially with each year a bad product stays in the catalogue, designing for cheap or sturdy being muchbless costly than designing for cheap and sturdy and so on), but I have no idea if Ikea are good enough to consider that consciously (I do think they'd at least be closer top that level than most others)

"It’s a great decision to destroy old used things" - so you're just assuming they're not going to re-sell them like the article stated that they would? Isn't it more reasonable to wait and see what they actually do with them before criticising them?

"Used old IKEA furniture was made from wood and had some level of quality." - They still make furniture out of solid wood. I just bought some nicer solid wood bookshelves from them. You have to pay a bit more, but that should go without saying. You're probably not paying more than what you would have payed back in the day when taking inflation into account.

I wouldn't presume what's more sustainable in the culture we have today. Making something out of solid wood, and having it thrown away after 20 years because it wasn't fashionable, or wasn't taken care of properly, could easily be way worse than making something out of veneer, wood fiber and cardboard if it's used for at least 10 years.

"Current new things there are made from paper!!!" - Yeah, some things are. So what? In my experience they're still engineered to do the job they need to do for as long as you need it to. I know there's cardboard core in a coffee table and some wall shelves I have. I've taken the shelf down and up several times without issues, and pushed it quite hard to test it, since I knew my kids might try to pull on it.. it was just fine. Kids have been jumping on the coffee table without problems. If you can get sufficient strength with less materials, why not? You have to be DAMN sure that the table will be used for 50+ years if you're going to make it out of a more resource intensive solid hard-wood.

"New IKEA things can’t be moved, because assembling and disassembling them does not work anymore. " - Uh, I just disassembled and reassembled a not very old cabinet made of wood fiber from IKEA. It was fine.

The article stated that the furniture should be returned without disassembling it. At my local IKEA I can rent a van for just 3 hours for a very low price, that should fit a couple of bookshelves without disassembling them.

I don't think the idea that we should make everything out of solid wood and have it last for 100 years is actually sustainable today. We're resource-constrained today, making everything out of solid wood would put a huge strain on the environment at a time where it's already under extreme pressure. The population in western countries is already starting to decline, so I don't see the point of sacrificing the environment today to reduce resource consumption in 50+ years. I don't think it's likely that solid wood furniture will be exported to Africa and South-East Asia where there will be population growth in the coming decades either.

Wood is actually pretty sustainable. It can be farmed and is a natural carbon capture.

It's worth emphasizing that issues with deforestation are primarily related either to using wood for fuel or land-use changes (replacing forests with soybean farms or palm oil). Using wood for paper pulp or construction is extremely manageable, and in terms of the latter, it's probably the most environmentally friendly construction material.

Exactly!

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