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Comment by sashank_1509 | Hacker News Reader

Typical sentiment I see that completely lacks any nuance. For one car vs IKEA are two completely different beasts entirely.

A car opened up new avenues that a human could never do before its invention. This itself makes it a far more worthy invention than most.

IKEA cheapened stuff and gave low quality cookie cutter furniture to everyone. Was this really a great thing, that propelled humanity forward? It’s also not like IKEA brought down the price to dirt cheap, it’s just like half or one third the price. What great thing will society lose if we ban IKEA tomorrow. People will spend a bit more on furniture, but they will have artisanal quality furniture and more artisans in society. That’s a trade I’d take any day.

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IKEA allowed people to afford decent quality furniture who otherwise couldn’t afford it. That’s a huge benefit in my view. Your “spend a bit more” is actually a huge amount for artisanal quality furniture.

That’s how commodization has always worked. Something is suddenly available for the masses with maybe some loss of quality.

Look at Excel. A lot of elitists look down on people doing complex stuff with it but in reality it has enabled many people to do stuff they would otherwise have to pay a ton of money for.

Back to furniture. You are free to buy artisanal furniture but for a lot of people worldwide it would be a huge loss if Ikea didn’t exist.

Not just decent quality, decently looking furniture.

If you look at any architectural magazine, you can in most cases spot a few IKEA pieces in there if you know how to look. Because they look "good" - or at least mostly neutral.

Cheap furniture used to _look_ cheap before IKEA.

IKEA is actually an example of a particularly horrible trade in this category. Claude estimates wood furniture price fell by 60% with IKEA. Plastic furniture on the other hand is 99% cheaper, far better at distributing furniture than IKEA ever will be.

So what did IKEA do, marginally cheaper furniture, complete destruction of demand for artisanal furniture (me alone buying some artisanal furniture is not propping up demand), apparently all our great wood workers should learn to code right now, but no worries LLM will code cheaper than them now, so maybe they should become YouTubers next.

And the particularly galling fact in this stupidity is the quality of the product is worse. Everyone now lives with worse furniture, the extra dollars they save, I guess they spend it on Netflix now, and we destroy a large avenue to express, human creativity, skill and craftsmanship for slightly cheaper furniture, lmao even. We will be perfectly fine with plastic furniture for the really poor, and higher quality more expensive hand crafted furniture for everyone else, they can maybe subscribe to Netflix less in return.

ikea made furniture easy to move, and easy to get furniture you actually want, vs being stuck with old stuff where the drawers are all stuck and its too heavy to move.

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