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Comment by sourcecodeplz | Hacker News Reader

There is no worse quality furniture than IKEA. There is no real wood, just sawdust and glue. It just "looks" nice. But even those looks don't compare with the shine of real wood.

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It's sawdust and glue if you buy the absolute cheapest IKEA stuff. And even that is pretty good quality considering the price. IKEA does sell furniture made out of real wood too, it naturally is just more expensive.

Most ikea stuff has a very good price quality ratio so that's not true. It also isn't true that they don't use real wood, it depends on what you buy.

Are you talking about current pricing? They’ve jacked up a lot of items 20-30% the past couple of years on top of reducing quality

That's a fair point and a trend I have definitely noticed as well. The price quality ratio isn't what it used. The founder died 5 years ago, I wonder if it's related. He was a notorious penny pincher.

It also depends on the region. Here in HK, Ikea is very expensive (about double the price I used to see in France), to the point where it's cheaper to get a wardrobe custom made in good quality plywood exactly according to our dimensions than to buy a wardrobe that's close to the dimensions we need in Ikea.

In Japan it was the only place I found with good reasonably priced furniture, especially for larger sofas and beds. Nitori was good quality but a bit more expensive and everything was low and small. Besides that, there seemed to be absolute junk for low prices and high end handmade stuff for very high prices. I simply wasn’t anywhere else with stuff in the midrange.

Now I love close to France and Ikea is definitely the best value for midrange. Some of the German chains are pretty good too (but still 30% more comparing similar quality).

Yup, lived in Japan before moving here and definitely matches my experience :) The one other store besides Nitori and Ikea was Muji. I bought a few furniture from them which was decent. Definitely more adapted to the Japanese market in term of dimensions.

That’s so cool. Plywood furniture in the UK is uber premium as plywood is super expensive here.

Lots of its wood was sourced from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. There’s some stuff like bed slats in certain sizes that have been out of stock for months at a time.

Barely 5% of their furniture is real wood though? It’s mostly sawdust and glue and veneer.

IMO a lot of their “out of stock” is fake scarcity.

I don't know about the percentage, but in my searches, their particle board stuff was the same price and much higher quality than other stores, and their solid wood stuff was cheaper than other stores.

I agree, and at the low and medium price points in Ikea, the quality is much better than a similar priced item from Amazon or Wal-Mart. And if you want solid wood, it will be hard to beat Ikea there as well.

I’ve moved twice internationally in the last several years and I tried to get kind of medium quality stuff and the only thing that could compete on price quality ratio with Ikea was used higher end furniture. But it requires a lot of effort and patience to collect.

Many end up painting over the "shine of real wood"

Also in some applications, you don't want real wood - it scratches too easily, to the point where a cheap laminate piece would look better (I have a very nice wood dining table I bought in July, but my cats won't stay off of it)

It really depends what you use it for. Engineered wood like MDF in general is better for cabinetry than wood.

You'll have to explain that to me. My experience with MDF has been that it is a mold-magnet if used anywhere near where it might be exposed to water (bathrooms and kitchens are out). It requires special fasteners as it doesn't hold screws (or even glue) well. It's ugly, heavy, is hard on cutting tools (and the dust in leaves in my shop tends to jam up tool joints that are supposed to slide/rotate like on a miter saw).

I pay more and go with a multi-ply plywood in any place that others might fall back to MDF.

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