Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

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Not to mention that when you pay $5000 for a sofa today, you don't really know if you're actually getting a sofa that will last 25 years or not, because you're not an expert in sofa construction techniques and frankly don't want to become one. So you might get totally ripped off.

Whereas if you pay $800 for the IKEA sofa every 5 years, you know you're actually getting what you're paying for.

Plus people move apartments, move houses, move cities. Sometimes every 5 years or even more often. The sofa that fit in the old apartment is too wide for the new one. Or the style that made sense in your prewar apartment looks silly in your modernist one. Or now you have kids and you need it to be stain-resistant. Or what felt like a cool trendy leather couch when you were 25 now looks tacky and vulgar to you when you're 34.

For a lot of people, a sofa that's a fifth the price, that lasts a fifth as long, isn't a bug -- it's a feature. Quite simply, your sofa needs change.

I don't understand where the idea comes from that IKEA sofas fall apart after 5 years. All of their sofas come with a 10 year warranty, even the cheapest ones. Here's one at the $850 price point: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/uppland-sofa-blekinge-white-s19...

Their more expensive ones come with a 25 year warranty and still only cost $2,500: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/stockholm-sofa-seglora-natural-...

It is a very "limited" warranty:

https://www.ikea.com/us/en/files/pdf/40/04/4004a9de/seating_...

If the sofa breaks, then sure it's covered.

But it explicitly doesn't cover fabric or leather coverings -- and good luck trying to convince them that the foam padding has gone all flat.

Whereas in my experience, how long a sofa lasts is determined precisely by how long the coverings and cushions last. (I've never in my life seen a sofa break.)

So the IKEA warranty is irrelevant there.

Your UPPLAND sofa may work great for 30 years in a guest room where it's sat on 5 times a year.

But good luck getting it to last 10 years in the living room where the whole family is using it every day and kids are climbing all over it. (Of course, more expensive IKEA sofas do tend to last longer than the cheapest ones -- people are usually talking about the cheap ones.)

No sofa has a 25 year warranty on fabric, that wouldn't make sense - but you can of course by insurance for it and usually most non-IKEA sofa shops will offer you Scotchguard cover usually for 3 to 5 years.

Depending on the Sofa you can or course get one that has IKEA+ which is replaceable covers, which you can't do with most other sofas.

(Disclosure: I work at IKEA, although I only found out the 25 year cover a few weeks ago)

The stuff that isn't covered is the stuff that will naturally wear out with use and can be easily replaced, so I don't see the problem.

The point is cheap stuff wears out a lot more quickly, and it's not easy or cheap to replace fabric and padding, and may not even be financially worth it.

The point is that having a 10 year warranty doesn't mean your cheap sofa is going to last as long as an expensive one. It's not a signal at all that IKEA sofas are high quality.

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