Firstly, IKEA sells a lot more than furniture. You might be able to make a table at home, but that's one of the simplest things IKEA sells. Making a bowl, or a drinking glass, or a clock is significantly harder. Most people don't have the skills or the equipment.
Secondly, IKEA don't simply sell furniture. They sell furniture at scale. Making a table is pretty trivial, but making 25,000 tables is a lot harder. That requires a robust supply chain, logging companies, wood mills, furniture factories, machines to do the work, even if you're going back to the way it was done 50 years ago rather than the massively computerized way IKEA does it. It isn't really possible in a modern global economy if your local currency has collapsed.
And then you have the problem that people are used to IKEA stuff being the minimum acceptable level of quality. People buy it because it's cheap, it looks OK, and it lasts a few years. So now not only do you need to make 25,000 tables, but they need to be at least as good as what people could buy before. Otherwise they definitely will remember, and they won't be very happy about it.
> And then you have the problem that people are used to IKEA stuff being the minimum acceptable level of quality.
People see the IKEA level -- whatever that is -- as the minimum acceptable level. Anything worse than IKEA is not worth considering.
I’d say IKEA serves as the benchmark of value for money.
Russian business would be crippled overnight, and probably plenty of lower government too.
Are Russia and China on good terms these days? Does Russia have anything to trade with China for yuan so they can buy those Chinese goods?
I guess we'll find out. Or maybe the US tries to sanction China for freely trading with those evil Russians? Interesting times ahead…
But China still can't produce certain high-end things. Say, a high-end server-class CPU is sort of problematic, event though ARM architecture allows to produce capable server CPUs. A powerful enough GPU is even harder to come by. I did not hear about high-capacity Chinese HDDs either. I suppose a lot of industries have such high-end goods that only 2-3 "Western" companies figured out how to produce. The embargo will hit hard in areas where such goods make a difference.
I only hope that the embargo will be lifted soon, because the current regime in Russia seems unsustainable.
Without sanctioning China, I really don't see how the US and her allies can prevent most "normal" goods from making their way (eventually) to Russia. Hell, even IKEA is in China.