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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

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.