Hacker News Reader

Comment by Hamuko | Hacker News Reader

How are wooden sporks and paper plates cost-cutting? They're single use, so you need to keep buying them, whereas you can wash silverware and dishes. And they're probably the cheapest possible silverware and dishes known to man since IKEA makes them.

Sounds more like a hygiene thing than a cost-cutting thing.

View on HN

Washing does require some amount of labor and water usage. We don’t get sodas in reusable bottles to return either for that reason.

We actually had that in Denmark prior to the turn of century... and basically only that or glass bottles for beverages, as cans were also banned. Now it's just like in other countries.

Bars often have returnable bottles for soda, and I occasionally see the same bottles at supermarkets. (Irma near me has Schweppes in glass bottles.)

Maybe people don't like to carry the heavy bottles around.

Also, all that glass adds substantially to the shipping weight. (almost half a kg per bottle, adds a lot of weight to a truckload of soda)

I was talking about reusable plastic bottles, though, which were washed and refilled in a similar way to glass bottles in Denmark. This was still the case in the 1990s, but it stopped at the turn of the century.

The energy to product these single-use utensils costs less than what a dishwasher person would cost with the current labor shortages, I suppose.

IKEA doesn't make anything. Their entire competetive advantage is inventing logistics 2.0

IKEA is well-known for it's innovative designs. They're just focussed on cost-saving for the most part.

If you are in logistics, and concerned with engineering for packaging, you have to analyze IKEA. They are among the very best at that.

They are not among the very best, they literally invented it and still hold the steering wheel.

That's like saying Apple doesn't make iPhones.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com