Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

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I generally like IKEA as a concept and furniture source, but am aware that big corporations use all sorts of tricks to get you to like them, use their stuff, not like or use competitors and so on.

But the IKEA hate seems mostly based on snobbery and/or brand awareness. Like those stories about random tech things that shoehorn Apple or Telsa into the title because it gets people to click. And people seem to hate other, poorer people wearing the same clothes as them, using the same chairs etc. It's weirdly self-defeating behaviour.

This article's most interesting bit is the part when they discuss IKEA's focus on low prices:

> The main ingredient of the company’s affordability is a technique called flat packing.

> The company reduces manufacturing, logistics, and fulfillment costs by disassembling items and fitting pieces together in a box as tightly as possible. “We hate air” is a common mantra at Ikea: Every pocket of space is accounted for and minimized.

> “Ikea designs products with manufacturing and transit in mind from the get-go,” said Katelan Cunningham, of the logistics software company Lumi. “They design for the realities of the supply chain, rather than having to make sacrifices for it.”

> Obsessive changes in packaging have saved Ikea millions of dollars:

> When Ikea transitioned its Ektorp sofa to be flat packed, it shrunk its packaging for that product by 50%, reduced its logistics by 7,477 truckloads, and led to a 14% price reduction for consumers. > Repackaging the Jules office chair by separating the base and the seat saved the company ~$1.4m per year.

I think the IKEA hate is amplified by the experience of being in their stores. I like IKEA products and do go and shop there, but I plan ahead to get in and out in less than half an hour, because after twenty minutes or so I start to get nauseous and feel like I'm having trouble breathing.

It's not because I have strong feelings about the products or the company, or just that I dislike shopping. There aren't any other stores that create the same reaction. Stores filled with products I hate, stores filled with products I love, stores filled with temptations, big stores, little stores, ugly stores, beautiful stores, malls, they're just places to shop, and while they might make me feel bored or irritated after a while, I don't get nauseous. They don't fill me with dread.

I honestly don't know why IKEA stores affect me like that. At first I thought it was anxiety about being disoriented, but it happens to me even in the local store where I know the layout. I have a lot of faith in habituation, mindfulness, and thinking things through as ways of mitigating anxiety, but they haven't helped. The only thing that affects me as viscerally and predictably is my fear of heights, so whatever it is, it feels primal.

I feel the same, one trick I use is to park close to the checkout doors, walk in through the exit and go immediately to the kiosk to find the location of the item I want.

I've purchased $100's worth of item in less than 20 minutes.

I usually end up giving up trying to buy anything after 20 minutes in Ikea. I am a runner that runs about 25 miles a week (so I am in decent shape) and the place exhausts me mentally, physically and emotionally.

I hate IKEA stores because of the way they force you in a specific direction, like rats in a maze. It's almost claustrophobic. So I associate their brand with authoritarianism.

The best way to shop IKEA, IMO, is to identify all the parts on their website. The website is good, it will show you the rack where everything is at the selected store. Make the parts & location list at home.

Then walk in from the exit side straight into the warehouse and pick up the boxes from the aisles you identified before.

The only drawback is that often things which are shown as in-stock are actually not (maybe it is a pandemic era thing).

I really hate being in the store. I hate going to the store, because it means a long drive out into the middle of nowhere. The time it takes to actually shop at ikea isn’t worth the price.

For whatever reason, I also hate being in the store. Something about it feels like I'm in some kind of evil villain's gauntlet fortress, like Bowser's levels.

I know this makes me look a lil crazy to others in the store, but if/ when I go to IKEA (for the prices, honestly), I have no qualms running through the store at my easy pace, to get what I need and get out as quickly as possible.

A lot of people who criticize Ikea focus on their cheap, MDF products. But Ikea also sells a $2500 couch. And I would argue that Ikea's $2500 couch is a much better value than a $2500 couch elsewhere.

This will likely depend where you live and what options are available to you, but my experience with Ikea's most expensive sofas vs similarly priced alternatives in the market has generally been favorable to the alternatives.

At least with the alternative, you sometimes get to pick from more than a handful of the same designs... I quickly grow tired of seeing the exact same Ikea furnishings in so many homes! I was so glad to finally not have a "KIVIK" in my home after decades of the same design. I'd also happily live the rest of my days never seeing a "POÄNG" chair ever again... That I even know these odd-sounding to me in my native tongue words for these products is a massive testament to their extreme ubiquity now.

EDIT: Out of curiosity I googled how many POÄNG chairs are out there, apparently over 30 million and grows at 1.5 million a year!

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Po%C3%A4ng

That's fair enough. But I've come to appreciate the consistency of Ikea's furniture. I can go to Ikea and know what a Kallax is. And they actually support and improve their product lines.

If you go to a boutique furniture store, you never know if you will see that table ever again. If you like something, you have to panic buy it right there. And you never know if that product line is a one off, with no interest in long term sales.

> the IKEA hate seems mostly based on snobbery

I don't like IKEA furniture because with very few exceptions, it's cheaply made. I want furniture made from durable materials like solid wood that continue to look nice after years of use and not just when it's new.

IKEA can be fine if the pieces you buy don't get touched very often or you buy their rare pieces that are well made.

For me, as someone who moves around a lot, being cheaply made is a feature. Real hardwood is much heavier than particle board or pine. The really cheap particle board stuff does just seem to fall apart on its own, but my pine furniture still completely functional, despite dissembling it multiple times. It just looks slightly banged up.

Perhaps you meant durable? My experience is that MDF is substantially heavier by volume, particle board less so but still heavier than most softwoods and certainly less durable.

You'd be pretty hard pressed to find furniture of better quality at the same price point.

> at the same price point

Not if you factor in the cost of repeatedly replacing your IKEA furniture

Who does this? I have almost all of my furniture from ikea and not a single thing has broken in years of having it. It all seems more structurally sound that high end furniture because ikea is not afraid to use nuts, bolts and metal brackets rather than flimsy wood joinery.

Exactly. I suspect most of the IKEA hate comes from people living in a wealth bubble who've never had to rent and assume the broken bookshelf they see on the side of the road is a genuine IKEA Billy that has somehow been unscavenged.

For people in that bubble, with a few exceptions (Lack!) IKEA furniture is designed to be disassembled and reassembled multiple times while lasting decades. It's an absolute godsend for people who are moving houses every few years.

Most of the garbage flat-pack you see smashed to bits on the side of the road is a knock-off made by another brand with ridiculously shoddy materials. I've personally cracked open an Amart bookshelf before to find honeycombed cardboard providing most of the structural integrity.

I've IKEA stuff that is 10 years old. If you're a person who doesn't abuse stuff then it's fine. If you have kids (or roomies) vs. IKEA, the kids will win every time tho

That's the thing though. Nowadays people don't really buy furniture with the intention of it lasting a lifetime anymore so you'd be replacing the expensive furniture as well.

I've got a kitchen table from IKEA, it's well made from solid wood. I expect it to last a lifetime.

Sure if you buy a $10 coffee table then it's likely to quickly fall apart but they have a lot of better quality products if you look.

>But the IKEA hate seems mostly based on snobbery and/or brand awareness.

I have one and only one reason for hating IKEA, before IKEA furniture was delivered fully built, then IKEA disrupted the market by having people build their own stuff, which, among other things, allowed them to be significantly cheaper. Now, at least were I live you can't have furniture delivered pre-built (unless you buy antiques) but you can hire a handyman to come build it for more than the price difference was between unbuilt and built before IKEA came to dominate.

Aside from that I understand text better than I understand graphics so I am always at a disadvantage dealing with IKEA build instructions, having to go through the drawings 4-5 times trying to identify where two pieces look almost exactly the same but have a significant little difference that must be paid attention to - something they could easily do with a single sentence on the relevant pages describing the differences.

Actually then I guess I have two reasons I hate IKEA.

Two the most astonishing things about humanity I learned in the last decade:

there are grown up people who can't follow simple graphic instruction to assemble a piece of furniture

there are grown up people who can't insert a duvet in it's cover... and they are proud of it

I'm in both groups (I suppose they may have significant overlap, as they seem related to some kind of spatial reasoning or perception). Not especially proud, but not ashamed, either.

There are also things that I find trivial and intuitive and other people struggle with. For example, telling "its" from "it's" is a common example.

Different strokes for different folks.

>(I suppose they may have significant overlap, as they seem related to some kind of spatial reasoning or perception).

I have ADHD and perhaps some light autism (hard to say as a light autistic-like personality would seem perfectly reasonable given my earlier life), at any rate in high school - in the U.S - they decided I needed some testing and they gave me a battery of Reading comprehension / Math / Spatial reasoning tests, in the reading comprehension I tested at the top 1% of the population, math top 20% of the population, spatial reasoning lowest 3% of the population - which caused them to give me physical therapy for a year with a guy who had me do crab walks and a bunch of other physical exercises to make me capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time I guess. I have also since read there is some overlap with spatial understanding problems and autism.

At any rate I still have a hard time understanding schema diagrams and UML models and of course IKEA building instructions, but I understand directed graphs and tree structures pretty well.

two of the most astonishing things I learned about humanity from a very early age:

different people have different capabilities, thus many people are not able to read or write at my level or to handle higher level of abstractions, but that doesn't make me any better than them because I am not able to deal with visual information as completely as they are (which may be related to some disability)

when you announce that you are not very capable in something there's always somebody who has to talk shit about it.

on edit: fixed grammatical error entered while writing and dealing with hyperactive 4 year old.

> different people have different capabilities

Yes, that's why shipping an unassembled furniture works for the most of the folks just fine.

BTW, shipping more units per truck is all green, eco and saves the world.

>Now, at least were I live you can't have furniture delivered pre-built (unless you buy antiques) but you can hire a handyman to come build it for more than the price difference was between unbuilt and built before IKEA came to dominate.

That doesn't add up from where I'm sitting. Hiring someone on Airtasker to build your furniture is about the same price as getting a delivery driver to drop off a piece of furniture.

If you're serious about saving money but struggle with DIY, just type your preferred IKEA product name into Facebook Marketplace. You can generally get them pre-assembled for about a third of the cost of new.

That doesn't add up from where I'm sitting

You missed the very beginning of his comment:

"at least were I live"

Where he lives is not where you live, or where I live. We all live different places with different levels of infrastructure and services available. Because things are different where you are does not negate his experience.

Thanks, I was going to make the point but I figured from "where I'm sitting" might just be in reference to their experience, where I'm at is Denmark and things here tend to be expensive, here for example is Ikea's service page https://www.ikea.com/dk/da/customer-service/services/assembl...

So Pax - 2 frames, hinged doors and fittings comes out to about $200+ for building it, little bit under 50 dollars for any order, for 30 dollars they take about the packing etc.

So obviously I end up building it myself in almost all cases, despite the fact that it takes me an hour more than it would everyone else because I always misbuild at least once and figure it out part of the way in, oh that had to be turned this way, I get it now! Could have saved me an hour with just writing "NOTE the small hole at the top edge of this picture, if you do not have that hole in the piece you are using you are using the wrong piece!" But Nope. Never gonna happen.

>where I'm at is Denmark and things here tend to be expensive

I'm in Australia, where the minimum wage is the highest in the world (Around US$20 for casual labour, even higher if you're covered by an industry award)!

If you want to pay $200 for an hour's semi-skilled work + $30 to throw a box away, that's on you. Unless Denmark has some incredibly odd demographics, there should be an army of dads on Facebook offering a mobile assembly service for a quarter of that price.

At the very least IKEA must have shrunk the market for fully assembled furniture, especially at the low end of the market. Any company that does want to play there is now doing it at substantially lower volume, negatively impacting unit economics.

Where I live I can definitely still buy fully assembled luxury furniture. I’m hard pressed to think of anywhere that would sell you a new, assembled bookcase for under $500 though.

There are any number of “real furniture stores” near me that will deliver brand-new furniture (it was always “assembled” as far as they’re concerned).

It’s not at the IKEA price point (which is a large part of the business advantage that IKEA has).

Are there really no furniture stores that deliver to where you live?

The only thing I have managed to get delivered assembled since moving back to Denmark in 97 has been some antiques / old used furniture. Most furniture home decoration places all work on the IKEA model from my experience, however there are a few places I see that have styles of furniture that strongly remind me of the 70s (while still new somehow) and I don't know if those are build it yourself, I would hope it comes assembled, seems sort of weird to have to build furniture that looks like 70s stuff. But of the furniture stores I have tried in Denmark -

https://www.bolia.com/ https://ilva.dk/ https://jysk.dk/ https://www.boconcept.com/da-dk/

I had to build stuff myself I bought there (although all offered services not priced to where I would want to take them). I also bought some stuff from Illums at one point I had to build.

Most of it is easy enough, but again, my feeling is just Ikea came in, drove the market price down by letting you build at home so everyone went in and did the same thing to compete, and now I cannot buy the things I want without building or paying a significant extra amount because the furniture business is no longer set to handle people not building it themselves - at least in Denmark.

From what I've seen in Italy, Sweden and Germany it seems the same, although that is just me visiting people and they have bought a bunch of stuff not just in Ikea but it needs building.

Honestly, I kind of enjoy assembling Ikea furniture. It's like Lego for grown-ups.

Legos are for grown-ups though :-). Please find some other analogy.

Edit: Damn HN, some humor, that’s all.

True, let's just say "it's like Lego" then, everyone likes Lego!

I don't know, whenever I see some programming language framework that's 'like Lego!' in how you assemble things, I think, damn, these people must hate Lego!

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

I don't see what the big deal is with assembling furniture from IKEA. Sure it might be a time sink initially, but only it needs to be done once. I bought an IKEA Jerker desk about 16 years ago that's still holding up wonderfully even after multiple moves. Also since I assembled it, I know exactly how quickly disassemble/reassemble it if I need to move it again.

>>unless you buy antiques

That, RIGHT THERE, is a real hidden gem.

If you look around, especially after spending just a bit of time observing and educating yourself, you can find astonishing bargains. They are everywhere, on Craigslist, in thrift stores, etc.. Where I live (New England area), you can find fine mahogany tables, dining room sets, cabinets, etc. for truly cheap money, often even free. It seems that most people these days either just do not appreciate the value of good furniture, or literally do not know what they are missing.

Obviously, you can find antiques that require fortunes to purchase, but that is really just the highly visible tail of the market. Just find a set of styles that suits you, and look for good construction and finishes. For the cost of an Ikea piece that'll last a few years, you can buy furniture that will last a lifetime (and already has lasted several). And the search is fun and builds fun memories.

Highly recommended

Europe here. Mostly agree with a couple of notable exceptions.

I grew up in a home 90% furnished with heirlooms and there are two antique categories I'd never buy for my own use: Dining chairs and beds. They just don't have the size and robustness I find comfortable. Antique beds for two use about the same mattress size as I used for a single growing up. It's horrible. And I can't rock old chairs back and forth without disassembling them spontaneously.

Now day beds, consoles, tables? Cookware? That's all my jam. (except for silver cutlery, taste horrible)

I'm 1.9 meters and have recently put on weight, several of my modern dining room chairs have disassembled on me spontaneously when I sat on them hard or rocked back and forth.

I'm about the same dimensions and and have taken my share of chairs back to pre-assembly. Furniture in general is pretty crap. Paradoxically I've found IKEA to be one of the most honest brands out there. I can normally tell by their look how sturdy they are.

My mom has one pink plastic IKEA office chair that's been a trooper. It's developed a stress fracture where the back meets the seat that goes at least 70% through the material from me rocking it and the thing is. still. holding. up.

I'm about 1.8 meters, and destroyed an old dining room chair some years ago, when I weighed probably 85 kg. I do tend to sit down hard. I can't say how old the chair was--it was something that my wife had bought, probably at a yard sale, some time before we met.

They also design their manuals in a way to save money: they don’t need to get them translated and printed in a dozen languages

I'm sure they have lots of good reasons for doing the things that make me dislike them, but I still dislike them for it.

I despise IKEA manuals, too. I refer to them as "Swedish hieroglyphics." The couple of times I've bought IKEA furniture for my own place, I've had people deliver and assemble it for me.

It’s amusing to me how many people on this supposedly intellectual forum got filtered by fairly simple visual instructions. Perhaps visual and special reasoning is not your strong point?

Ikea is garbage throwaway furniture that doesn’t last.

I’d love to see the return of quality goods that last forever. I have some inherited ethan allan furniture that was super expensive back in the day. It’s still holding up.

I recently sold a glass GALANT table that had been with me for like 15 years. I only got rid of it because I got an electronically adjusting table for cheap from the office clearance sale.

My sofa, TV stand, shelves, batteries, drinkware, plates and so on are surviving pretty well too. I've really only had two notable IKEA things break: glass tea jar shattered for unknown reasons, and the gas spring on my office chair broke. Thankfully the office chair had a 10-year warranty, so I had the entire chair replaced under warranty.

Ikea offers a choice of affordable furniture that is easily "good enough". The price point is great for young families: accidents with furniture are not a catastrophe, you can afford to replace it.

If you want design, go for that. If you want solid oak-levels of sturdiness, go for that. Me, if I need a chair/cupboard/wardrobe/..., I don't want to break the bank, but I do want choice of something that'll last long enough.

They're cheap enough so that i wasn't hesitant about trying modifications myself, yet sturdy enough that the furniture survived for over a decade and a half so far, and going strong.

Have you had ikea furniture fail before? I felt the same, it _feels_ like it’s going to fail but then it just never does. I have a little set of the Malm draws which must be about 15 years old now and are still perfectly fine and like new. While plenty of high end stuff has failed on me because the wood joinery comes loose. Ikea uses nuts and bolts which hold things together much better than joinery.

Yes labor costs are enormous in Denmark, but you should direct your blame inwards towards the population and the government you elect if you want that to change. It's not IKEA causing those.

If you can afford prebuilt solid wooden/metal furniture you really aren't in the price bracket of most IKEA shoppers.

>But the IKEA hate seems mostly based on snobbery and/or brand awareness.

what? Ikea was always the cheap brand, not expensive one, nor premium one - there is no snobbery attached to it.

The snobbery is directed downwards towards IKEA.

The snobbery is in the haters.

What do you mean "brand awareness?" As in "I hate IKEA because it's IKEA and they're known for cheap furniture?" If that the case, then that's an accurate characterization. Most IKEA furniture is made primarily of particleboard or pine wood, which are both the cheapest materials within their class. I don't know a whole lot about their metal pieces, but I imagine the situation is similar.

All furniture < $300 is going to be made this way. Wayfair, Overstock, etc is this way including the assembly required. Foam cushions/mattresses come with all of the air sucked out to make the shipping size as small as possible.

The weight alone of furniture made with real wood would make shipping multiple times more expensive than the cost of the item.

> The weight alone of furniture made with real wood would make shipping multiple times more expensive than the cost of the item.

That's obviously not true. An 77 1/2" IKEA Hemnes bookcase sells for $199 and is made of pine. A comparable 75" bookcase[0] made of alder costs $550 with free shipping. Since alder costs about 70% more than pine[1], there's no way shipping adds "multiple times... the cost of the item."

---

[0]: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/hemnes-bookcase-white-stain-903...

[1]: https://www.buildwithrise.com/stories/benefits-of-alder-wood

> But the IKEA hate seems mostly based on snobbery and/or brand awareness.

That seems off, since IKEA is basically the low-cost alternative to fancy brands. I buy in IKEA for the low-cost, good-enough & functional furniture, but with the understanding that it's definitely fairly low quality.

I think it is the same with articles like this article: people don't like to assign importance to the banal things, so they come up with all kinds of "clever tricks" explanations.

The banal thing is that IKEA is cheap for this level of quality. (and that this quality is good enough for most people).

> once an Ikea product hits the shelves, the company is militant about maintaining, or even reducing, its retail price

aka Jeff Bozos "your margin is my opportunity".

Being able to run the company with low margins are the best defence against competition.

>aka Jeff Bozos

I don't know if that was typo or deliberate. It's the first I've seen it, but I love it to the point I will forever spell it this way.

It was a typo, but fitting. IMHO, too much of "mee too" in Blue Origin instead of fixing the long-term "trust in products" problems at Amazon.

But the IKEA hate seems mostly based on snobbery and/or brand awareness.

I don't hate them, on the contrary I'm a regular customer that doesn't mind assembling.

I dislike the "maze", yes I know the shortcuts, but I can't help wondering what would happen in an emergency.

You'd get out faster than in most other circumstances?

In an office, one is typically on some crazy floor and can't use the elevator. Home, perhaps one is asleep in one's pyjamas.

In an emergency you look up for the green escape signs which point exactly to the nearest escape which usually is a door very close by that just leads to a staircase down to ground.

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