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Thread: Why's everybody baggin' on IKEA?

  1. #31
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    What is all the hysteria about?

    I have not seen one reply to this thread by an Ikea owner claiming it's quality furniture. I think you get a good product for what you are paying for.
    I am a part time woodworker making furniture pieces for sale. I don't feel threatened by Ikea. It fills the needs of a certain market that either dont want to spend a lot of money on furniture for whatever reason or can't afford to. This does not affect me. These people would not buy from me anyway. Given their budget, if Ikea didn't exist, they would be buying furniture from Goodwill or a resale shop.
    I am not competing with Ikea. I am competing for $$$$. My major competitors are the gasoline companies, the farmers, the food stores, the drug stores etc.

    Let the games begin.
    Retired, living and cruising full-time on my boat.
    Currently on the Little Tennessee River near Knoxville

  2. #32
    Quote Originally Posted by Sonny Edmonds View Post
    Because I don't like it when somebody comes to me for a custom project, then gets indignant when they don't get an Ikea price.
    If you can't see what all this imported crap has done to the USA and the American labor market, no amount of explanation can help you see clearly.

    I'll give you this much, it beats the crap flooding in from China.

    "Ya know, Vern, some folks will never be able to see the forest through all them trees!"
    It sounds to me like the problem isn't with Ikea but with the type of people your business attracts. Blame the intelligence of your customers instead of Ikea.

    I agree that imports have hurt the American market but some of the fault lies with the American manufacturers. And what difference does it make whether the stuff is imported from Europe or China? Any imports hurt the American market so why differentiate? Would you feel better if it was an American company that was making the cheap furniture?

    It looks like you have 3 choices: 1) Build cheaper furniture to keep the prices down. 2) Learn to be a better salesman to explain to the complaining customers why your furniture costs more. 3) Find a different class of customers and blow off the rest.

    Bruce

  3. #33
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    I have an Ikea Poang chair. It's a bentwood chair with a pad velcroed on. I performed the 2 am bottle feedings for both of my children in that chair or it's twin.

    13 years later one of those chairs is in the corner of the living room and it's my laptop chair. I'll replace it eventually with a Morris Chair when I have the skill to actually build a Morris Chair for myself ...

    +1 on the Swedish meatballs.

    The best part of Ikea is walking around and reading the names. It seems to me that some american is looking at the items, thinking of adjectives and related words and then saying them in a swedish accent. At some point they come up with something that sticks. Some of the names almost seem tongue in cheek!

    Jim

  4. #34
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    Nov 2005
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    I've bought Ikea kitchen cabinets. IMO they're great. A few steps up from builder's grade or Borg stuff. All solid wood on front, no particle board on the doors, facework, and all the hinges and drawer sliders are still smooth after 5 years.
    The freestanding base cabinets I bought, like http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/90049200 I couldn't buy the stock for their prices. All solid Beech and stainless steel.

  5. #35
    Obviously it's important to know what you're getting, but if you do, the prices on some IKEA's stuff is nearly unbelievable. I couldn't even buy the stock for the price. Yeah, it's not what I would build, but I'm not gonna build EVERYTHING, not all at once anyway.,

    FÖRHÖJA - island, solid birch $99

    PRONOMEN - 1-1/8x25x96 solid beach countertop $79

    HELMER makes good shop storage.

    Their triple clad FAVORIT cookware is comparable to AllClad for a fraction.

    +1 on the POANG chair, I doubt I'll ever approach the simplicity, quality and comfort with anything I'll ever make. I think it look pretty good too.

    The HJUVIK faucet isn't cheap but it ROCKS!!

    I avoid the PB core stuff, I hate minifix kd fasteners, but I kinda like IKEA and I'm not ashamed to admit it.

    -kg

  6. #36
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    Chris - I think you and others may be drinkin the KoolAid. Sure, IKEA uses Blum & Blumotion and gets a great deal because of volume. But.............what they don;t tell you is that Blum makes that stuff on contract for IKEA only and to IKEA's specs and price point. You are not getting the same full extension drawer runner with soft close that you'd get at you local cabinet hardware supplier costing 25 bucks a throw. Is it good enough? For the money - probably, but lets not forget we're still comparing apples to oranges. My neigbor just got a brand new BMW 1 series. Much newer than my top of the range 750il, which do you think is the better car? But they are both BMW's he says. Names and labels are no assurance of quality these days.

  7. #37
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    Asking woodworkers what they think of IKEA is like asking fine Italian chefs what they think of Olive Garden.

    My perspective is the stuff at most furniture stores is even lower in quality than IKEA and it's priced much higher. I have visited many, many furniture stores. Just about everything in them is particle board with contact paper. Most people look at it, think it looks swell, and pony up. Then people see this stuff in their friends' houses and they buy it too. Thus, you end up with expensive, custom homes full of particle board and contact paper furniture.

    I think IKEA is a major step up from that stuff. When my son moved to Seattle a few years ago, we went to the IKEA store. (That place ginormous!) The boy got a very nice queen sized futon with a steel frame for a song. It's a great bed/couch. He also got a small table and four chairs made of solid wood. It's a very soft wood with some kind of oil finish, but I thought it was a swell buy. He would have paid more for particle board and contact paper at American Furniture Warehouse.

    As for IKEA furniture not surviving college students, what would? Sheesh, you could make furniture out of cinder blocks and college students would trash it. And I think a lot of students these days throw out their furniture because they don't want to haul it away. Rich college kids will just get new stuff.

    Anything an accomplished woodworker makes in his shop is going to be far superior to almost everything available in the new furniture retail market. The only real competition for furniture we make is fine antiques and a few specialty, custom guys.

    So, IKEA is the Olive Garden of furniture stores. I think that's just fine.

  8. #38
    I actually mostly like IKEA, but have mixed feelings. I've got 3 of the Poang chairs, two downstairs and one upstairs in my office. Got a sofa with removable slipcovers in the sitting room- cheap removable slipcovers are great, particularly with dogs around. Scale is good for smaller houses and rooms. The design and engineering is pretty well done and simple. It is what it is.

    Is their stuff disposable? Yes. But then again I guess so is 90% of what I see at Pottery Barn, Ashley Furniture, or even a Basset outlet these days. IKEA is light years ahead of the Sanford crap at Wal*Mart. If I was on a tight budget and needed to furnish a living space NOW I'd probably buy a bunch of stuff from there. Servicable quality (no better, no worse) for a low price- as opposed to servicable quality with a sales pitch for a higher price at most other retail outlets.

    The pricepoints on some bits are insane. I know I couldn't buy the materials plus hardware for some of the items. The hate is probably because of this. It sets an expectation of what something 'should cost'. This makes it harder to sell a finely crafted solid wood dresser for $1200 when you can get a servicable one at IKEA for $250.

    Deeper down, I think some of the disdain is because it corrupts what we feel furniture should be. IKEA furnature is like kitchen cabinets, it has a finite lifetime. It's mortal. It doesn't live through the ages like some federal pieces have over the years, like some pieces folks on this forum have made will live on years from now. IKEA furnature is contemporary, but temporary. A well crafted QSWO mission table is permanant. It lives on.

    Most consumers aren't willing to pay for immortality, for fine craftsmanship. That's what IKEA reminds us of. And it makes us sad.

  9. #39
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    Quote Originally Posted by John Schreiber View Post
    I think it's the difference between furniture you buy for today vs. furniture you buy for a lifetime and more. Ikea has attractive well designed well built disposable furniture.

    I think it's bad for the soul to live in a disposable world.
    A huge amount of the goods we buy that are disposable now weren't 50 years ago, but I don't think that all that much has changed in furniture. What we see of the good old days is the well-built stuff that managed to survive. What we don't see is all of the very cheap furniture that was made for factory workers, etc that is long-gone. Houses are like that as well: very few people lived in Victorians, but sometimes it seems that way because most of the ramshackle buildings that the majority of the people inhabited are long-gone.

  10. #40
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    ^^ Very good points, Greg. It's like all the people I know who inherit fine antiques and exquisite jewelry from relatives. I used to wonder why I never inherited anything like that. Well, I eventually figured out my family members never had any money. All the stuff they owned wore out and was thrown away. There was nothing left to pass down, which is OK by me. I do have some very beautiful pictures of my ancestors.

    Come to think of it, I probably wouldn't want that aquamarine, naugahyde couch and faux marble coffee tables my grandparents had anyway.

  11. #41
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    Greg - Very well put

    Quote Originally Posted by Greg Pavlov View Post
    A huge amount of the goods we buy that are disposable now weren't 50 years ago, but I don't think that all that much has changed in furniture. What we see of the good old days is the well-built stuff that managed to survive. What we don't see is all of the very cheap furniture that was made for factory workers, etc that is long-gone. Houses are like that as well: very few people lived in Victorians, but sometimes it seems that way because most of the ramshackle buildings that the majority of the people inhabited are long-gone.
    I always try to stress that point. As a matter of fact, the finer furniture built today is far superior in quality to almost anything built a few hundred years ago, mainly due to new techniques and new technology. Most people never get to see this stuff unless you look in Architectural Digest or similar magazines. I can assure you that an $8000 dining table will be an heirloom.
    Who has $8K to spend on a dining table? The same kind of people that bought the equivelant pieces 200 years ago that you see in museums.

    200 years ago not many furniture makers made junk. And even fewer people could aford it.
    Retired, living and cruising full-time on my boat.
    Currently on the Little Tennessee River near Knoxville

  12. #42
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    Quote Originally Posted by Per Swenson View Post
    A month or so ago I saw a Cragslist add, Ikea...Furniture assembler.

    50 bucks a hour. Two hour minimum.

    Hey, that's great. I mean whats your overhead? A screwdriver?

    Tough times.

    Per
    No, the overhead is more than just a screwdriver. Travel time to and from the jobsite. If working legally, then you may need to get a handyman's license, pay unemployment insurance, workman's comp, liability insurance, social security on both sides of the paycheck, etc. Then there's the risk. You're going to other folk's homes. There's a reason pizza delivery is one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, and it ain't because of the pepperoni.

    That rate is pretty high, $35 is much more reasonable. However, in this day and age when so many folks have minimal manual skills, there will be folks who will pay $50 an hour for assembly of RTA items. Aside from a home gym or jungle gym/swingset, nothing in the RTA world should take a competent assembler more than an hour, so the 2 hour minimum is goofy.
    It came to pass...
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    The road IS the destination.

  13. #43
    You obviously haven't attempted to put together a doll house with Christmas morning fast approaching.
    Mike Null

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  14. #44
    Quote Originally Posted by Dave Sabo View Post
    Chris - I think you and others may be drinkin the KoolAid. Sure, IKEA uses Blum & Blumotion and gets a great deal because of volume. But.............what they don;t tell you is that Blum makes that stuff on contract for IKEA only and to IKEA's specs and price point. You are not getting the same full extension drawer runner with soft close that you'd get at you local cabinet hardware supplier costing 25 bucks a throw. Is it good enough? For the money - probably, but lets not forget we're still comparing apples to oranges. My neigbor just got a brand new BMW 1 series. Much newer than my top of the range 750il, which do you think is the better car? But they are both BMW's he says. Names and labels are no assurance of quality these days.
    The 1 series is faster and handles much better - what else would you want in a car?

  15. #45
    I am only gonna dicker with you a little bit, John.

    2 hour min assumes the guy, just to show up, gets a hundred bucks.

    Folks furnish whole apartments in NJ with Ikea.

    Do you think some entrepreneurial kid on Craigs list is concerned

    with WK Comp, Tax's, the gubbimint in general?

    Cash is king. You know, like the kids that shovel driveways.

    Me? I may agree with you, but I give the kid credit for putting down the bong and cell phone.

    Per
    "all men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night....wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible."
    T.E. Lawrence

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