I think Canada might have an opportunity to help Europe at least reason a bit about regulations.
For the most part I am thankful that the EU regulates things strictly. As long as I am the consumer of what is regulated and not the maker. Because while the regulation is well meaning, it is not always effective or efficient. And sometimes it achieves absolutely no positive results.
And yet, I am generally for regulating a lot of things.
For instance the cookie-popup-horseshit is failed regulation that came about mainly because regulators were squeamish about real solutions that would have required constant judgement calls. Instead of posing an existential risk to companies that run roughshod over our privacy, they created impotent regulation that is a dual failure: it protects exactly nobody and it wastes everyone's time multiple times over.
Companies that do bad things should face existential risks. It is the only mechanism that works. Fines only work for small players. For large players it is surprisingly often a calculation where the numbers dictate you DO bad things because the downside risk is mostly quantifiable and financially acceptable.
Yes, sanctioning companies guilty of egregious violations of privacy would have been noisy, but it would have been the right thing to do. And it would have been cheaper and more effective than what we have today.
Quality was the norm when people had little or no disposable income and expensive things had to last for a lifetime, and some less expensive things (like shoes) had to last years.
Quality was what you judged products on and the origin of brands.
The overwhelming majority of brands today are meaningless because they have nothing to do with quality. They are either status markers or tools for exploiting our tendency to form habits.
You need go no longer than your local hardware store. Almost all the consumer grade electrical tool brands today are from perhaps 2 manufacturers. But you are likely to have a preference that you tell yourself is grounded in a rational, informed choice. Except, it mostly isn't. You probably buy the same toothpaste every time. Not because you have done an exhaustive study of toothpaste and concluded it is the best one for you. But because it is what you are used to buying.
(Yes, there are still some professional tool brands that make their own electric tools, but the kind of stores consumers shop in don't have those since they cost an arm and a leg)
Yes, quality used to matter. A lot. But most people alive today have not lived in those times. People have a hard time imagining things that are outside their own experience. So much so that they can even conclude "it can't be if I haven't experienced it".
I am starting to see how many developers actually need to re-learn programming in the age of LLMs.
A while back Claude went down in the middle of a somewhat frantic initial deployment of a product to production at a company where a friend of mine works. And suddenly nobody was able to do anything. Because nobody had actually read the code and had no idea how it worked.
So essentially: much of their day to day work now depends entirely on the availability of a couple of frontier LLMs.
If, for a moment, we set aside the fact that Europe is strongly incentivised to depend less on the US, and US companies, it should worry us that so many sectors are dominated by 1-3 or so players. One of the selling points for market capitalism, which we at least pretend to believe in, is efficient allocation of resources through competition. But when the market is dominated by de facto monopolies there exists no real competition and there is no real market.
Even in the previous political climate this should, objectively, be deemed a problem. Having 90% of all eggs in one basket is neither good, nor does it constitute functioning market.
I'm not sure what the Cloudflare market share is in the US, but if it is the same as in Europe, this is a problem for US companies as well.
How would one hold Google accountable? By fining them $1bn? $10bn? $100bn? To them it is just the cost of doing business.
We're beyond holding huge companies accountable. The only way they could be held accountable is if there was personal risk involved for the CEOs. There isn't.
At this point, breaking them up into smaller companies. Then start fining the individual companies so the balance sheets feel the fine more. Increase the fines exponentially for each violation.
What is the likelihood of that happening? Realistically? Does anyone think government can, or even wants to, break up large companies? The large companies _own_ the politicians.
If I am the evil corporations owning the state I would love to make all citizens pathetic cynics who think they have no capability for change and therefore bears no responsibility.
If a scam ad is found, at the very least, require them to disclose business records to show how much money the scam ad made (revenue, not profit), and make them repay it. Leave it up to the platform whether to recoup the paid-out share from the publisher or not.
If they are caught doing it repeatedly without taking adequate measures to stop it, treat them as an accessory to the crime.
An architect friend of mine once said that he admired IKEA above all other furniture manufacturers because it made a modern range of aesthetics available to the masses. IKEA had done more to evolve the public taste than any other manufacturer.
And I do have to agree. I can remember what ghastly furniture most shops used to have around here. There was a lot of what we call "cabin furniture" - which isn't made to look good, just be practical. (Well, some people like that look, but it is a bit...dull). Sure, there was more solid wood furniture, but guess what: that durability comes at a cost. Not only in terms of money, but also in terms of how easy it was to install and move.
And who buys furniture to pass it on to your kids? Your kids will be unburdening themselves of your old furniture before you are in the ground.
As for quality: I have owned some pricey designer furniture and I can't say that I'm always impressed with the quality. Yes, if you have a lot more money you can get really well built furniture. But IKEA is more often than not more than sufficient quality. (Also see their "hidden tags" campaign)
If I pay $5000 for a chair I have reason to expect a lot from it. And more often than not, pricey furniture doesn't actually deliver sufficient quality to be able to defend the price. (Collectible furniture is a whole different deal where you don't actually care all that much about quality, but more about it being an original piece).
For those of you who look down on IKEA furniture, I'd like to hear about what alternatives you think need mentioning. Especially for young people or people of modest means. And I'm not trying to make some clever rhetorical point here. I can't really think of any company that offers what they offer and comparable quality, looks and price here in Europe.
>IKEA had done more to evolve the public taste than any other manufacturer.
I have lived and worked around a fair chunk of the western world, establishing my local headquarters each time, building myself a home.
Long, long ago, I gave up on IKEA for everything except cookware and meatballs.
The reason?
I grew rapidly tired with seeing my living room everywhere. Move across the US, get invited over for dinner with new colleagues: oh, that's my old couch. Cross Germany for personal reasons, stay at a friends place - yeah, that's the kitchen I had in LA. Couch-surfing for a few months in Tokyo? Right, you get the point, same coffee table.
It just became, impersonal. I get it, mass furniture, for the masses, has its time and place and economies.
But as I got older and traveled a lot more out of my own box, I saw the repetition.
These days I go to what remains of those ghastly furniture shops, or the second hand markets, or the good flea markets (which don't accept IKEA stuff) .. and do my best to assemble my living devices from older, antique things.
Its not so easy.
But, it does accomplish one thing: it's mine. I won't see this setup anywhere else in the world, again.
>For those of you who look down on IKEA furniture, I'd like to hear about what alternatives you think need mentioning.
One should not overlook the value in spending the IKEA budget on tools and instead rolling ones' own ...
My hypothesis is that phones are inherently personal and personalisable: it’s our photo on the lock screen and our text messages in the app.
Whereas most people don’t even consider attempting to personalise their couch or their car, so the desire for personalisation is satisfied by having a wide variety of options and colours prior to purchase. And also by having styles rapidly evolve so that many “trendy” and “anti-trendy” options are available at the time of purchase.
Interesting. Judging by the number of "skinnable" computer and phone apps, a lot of people seem to really care about this kind of personalisation. I have never so much as changed the default background on a phone that I've owned. I think I changed the background on my first Windows computer, decades ago, but not since.
What do you think Phone Cases are for? People love phone cases because it gives their devices a bit uniqueness. AirPods also have cases. Other than that for Obvious Reasons Phones all look similar. The shape of your phone is not self expression. However i would hazard a guess if you look into the phone on the home screen you will not find two alike.
YMMV obviously but when I see someone using a phone case it's usually one of those thick rubbery protective ones, or one of those with a flap over the screen that also holds credit cards and IDs. There is a clear utilitarian case for phone cases. Pun unintended.
Laptop stickers, too; I only entered circles where Macs were popular in about 2012 and it became apparent you should personalize it a bit else it gets lost in the other three dozen macbooks in the vicinity, especially at hackathons / conferences / etc.
This is in a thread about them having to be beautiful and modern. "Modernity" seems to boil down to actually being a bit afraid that your AirPods could have a near-monogamous relationship with you, and that this would mean that you're falling behind.
Monotony and monoculture is not beautiful in some people's opinions. It seems that part of the definition of beauty is exception.
iPhones and speakers (headsets, earsets) are accessories, furniture is more permanent (unless it’s near-disposable). You don’t typically update furniture every two to three years (with exception for people who like to show off their wealth and remodel every four years).
Back in the 1990s, it seemed literally like every other person had that Ikea bentwood rocking chair. So I relate to your point. Ikeas poor-sellers remain obscure though.
That's because you do have the most common stuff: that's a choice. You could have a less common smartphone (iPhone SE? Fairephone?), audiophile headphones (Denon? Kef?), ... that would be more personal and better choice.
Because iPhone/AirPods are a wealth and fashion signifier. IKEA is a flat-pack THX-1138.
Fight Club summarised it beautifully two decades ago:
“- Like so many others, I had become a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct.
Narrator: Uh, yes. I’d like to order the Erica Pekkary dust ruffles.
Operator: Please hold.
- If I saw something clever like a little coffee table in the shape of a yin-yang, I had to have it. The Klipske personal office unit, the Hovetrekke home exer-bike, or the Johannshamn sofa with the Strinne green stripe pattern. Even the Rizlampa wire lamps of environmentally friendly unbleached paper. I’d flip through catalogs and wonder: What kind of dining set defines me as a person? I had it all. Even the glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections. Proof that they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous peoples of…
Operator: Please hold.
Narrator: Wherever. I was holding.
- We used to read pornography. Now it was the Horchow collection.”
A couch is something I've shared with my loved ones, old and new, watching TV, chatting together, crying together, having real memories over time. A dinner table, same factor: life is punctuated by the scratches and tears that accrue.
Besides that, it's not about having a monogamous relationship with a material object.
It's about mono-culture, as a whole, being somewhat detestable. If you travel through your life, change cities, change countries, change cultures, learn new languages, you might have an easier time understanding this.
Variety is the spice of life. Seeing the same bland furniture across the globe, not so much.
I probably don't understand what "fashionable" means, but I've always suspected that in order to be fashionable you have to give up your dignity and, ironically, your individuality.
It's like that (probably apocryphal) hipster story that was doing the rounds on the interwebs a few years ago. Angry with someone for having used an image of him to describe the stereotypical hipster. Only to then find out it wasn't a picture of him, he did look like the stereotype of a hipster and that there was nothing unique or individual about being like all the other affected "unique and individual".
What a horrific idea: to expend effort to stand out just for the sake of standing out. How does one end up there without first having lost a big chunk of individuality?
IKEA is fine when you’re just starting out, but after years, you realize that it’s got a shelf life. Good furniture really is better. You can get great stuff for very reasonable prices on Craigslist and Facebook marketplace, and it’s much more solid, durable and interesting than the cookiecutter ikea stuff.
Some of it is very good, although you have to dig to find it. They use real wood in many pieces; it's not all disposable.
I don't think that the good stuff is popular, though, and it certainly isn't highlighted. When a durable (often secretly classic) design slips in, it doesn't last more than a few years. The price is usually too high and it's usually too heavy (for their audience, not for me.)
I've still got some really elementally designed and sturdy mounted shelves from them that I've carried from place to place, and installed and removed many times, for the past 30 years. They were probably discontinued 28 years ago; I couldn't find them in back catalogs and AI couldn't even help. I would have started to doubt that I got them from IKEA except that I have one set of components that is still in the packaging. It's simple steel and simple wood, and the wood (IKEA pretending like a plain flat wooden board is a product) is easily replaceable.
I have to be honest, I don't really value furniture that is heavy for the sake of it. I like hippy-futons, simple wooden tables with drawers and removable legs, transformer chairs*, etc. Being able to be disassembled and easily moved or stored is something I value, and being able to be flattened against a wall so the room can be temporarily reconfigured (a requirement for colonial US furniture) is ideal (double drop-leaf tables are wonderful.) Wood and steel are durable, and simple designs with standard hardware are easily reparable.
Funny you should mention this. Just yesterday my wife and I went to the local Ikea to pick up some bookcases. I was originally just going to buy a bunch of the Billy bookcases; we have a few and know their limitations.
But then I noticed they had a much better series called the Hemnes made with actual solid wood shelves and legs so you can route power cords and clean under them. Nice.
So instead of a bunch of Billy's for $70 each I ended up with a bunch of Hemnes' for $350 each. We'll see if it's worth it when they get delivered tomorrow.
I converted my cheap Billy shelves into what look like fitted shelves. They're all bolted together, screwed to the wall, filled in around the edges with wooden panels, and finished off with 2.5m decorative strips of pine at all the edges and joins. Then I painted the whole lot the same colour and filled them with books. Looks amazing, cheap as hell. Nobody guesses they're Billy shelves.
Bought four Hemnes last year for my sitting room library and various pieces of molded hardwood for a kick board and fascia. Finished up as a single fairly solid built-in bookcase the full length of one wall. The legs allowed for passing wires under (accessible via the removable bottom shelf) and up behind so it can have lighting.
I've got a bunch of BILLY bookcases that have survived several moves and are conveniently easy to mod with basic power tools.
Sadly, I don't know if it's worth trying to keep them at this point, because they replaced the previously decently durable wood veneer surfaces with glued on wood-pattern paper wraps (https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/ikea-furniture-inflation...). It's lead to me having a mix of old ones that still look like the day I put them together and new ones where all the corners are already visibly raveling from the wear of a single move.
I've had a lot of my Ikea furniture for over a decade. That includes a dining room table, several bookshelves, office table with glass top, coffee table, and several other things I've forgotten about, and we have some dressers that are years old as well. And several of these pieces have been involved in a move or two.
Applying care and some wood glue during construction will yield a very solid product for years to come. And you have to have a little bit of taste and discretion when buying, as Ikea indeed has a wide range of quality among their items. Any item that has real wood will definitely last.
Even their honeycomb stuff can be surprisingly good. I have a Malm desk for over a decade, disassembled and reassembled twice for moving, and it's as good as new
Sure, you could probably punch through the desk surface with a screwdriver. But within normal use it holds up great
I couldn’t justify the cost of the furniture I really want. So off to IKEA I go!
And if you have a bit of skill at choosing and assembling IKEA furniture, then you can customise things on the cheap so at least it can look the way you want.
While helping friends move, as one does, I often challenge them to disassemble and reassemble their IKEA gear and still have it tight on the other side, so to speak, of the particle board ..
Some do it with grace, some of us with a bit of duct tape. Others, not at all.
It depends very much on the furniture, I think citation needed on exactly which items you’re talking about. Name and shame!
The big wardrobes? They are the worst combination of impossibly heavy, awkward to disassemble and expensive to repurchase - best bet is to sell to the next occupant. On the other hand I have a solid table and chairs and they flat pack and reassemble perfectly. Same with bed frames. Shelving units go straight in the van. I wish the office desktops had metal threaded inserts for the legs instead of nylon, but otherwise also have moved several times and no real issue.
I wanted to move on from ikea furniture, but for TV furniture (tv, consoles, games, etc) there was just nothing out there besides either custom made furniture or ikea sets. I'm very happy with the latter, in the end.
Yes, the problem is durability before Ikea was counted in centuries. Sure, this or that furniture may need to refit the hinges or refill the cushions every few decades, but your local handyman/handywoman would do it for cheap and the furniture would be well for some more decades.
That, and apart from the tiny unfortunate period during which everything had to be leaded or mixed with uranium, your traditional furniture will degrade gracefully over time and not poison your entire family. Ikea-like (not just Ikea) furniture is already full of toxic chemicals.
You’re unfortunately vastly overrating the world before Ikea. I have the furniture passed down from the 70s and 80s and it’s all falling apart and made from plywood.
You have to go back to the 30s and earlier before you get furniture that will stand up like that, and making that furniture new today would cost more than almost anyone could afford.
And the only 30's - 60's furniture that survives will be mostly solid cabinets; they are neither in style (if you care) anymore, but more importantly they're no longer practical, as they were built for different lifestyles and - habits. Writing desks are cute in theory but nobody sits down to write letters anymore.
You are correct, I used Ikea as a generic name for cheap plywood stuff. But there was still strong furniture being built in that era, it didn't all stop in the 1930s, if anything, because a portion of the population even in the global north had not converted to a "modern" post-WWII lifestyle as we see in the movies.
People don't get rid of it because it gets worn out. They get rid of it because they want to change their surroundings. Imagine being stuck with the same furniture for the rest of your life?
Why would I want to buy furniture that lasts centuries? I'll be dead in a few decades and exactly nobody would be lusting after a couch with decades of my flatulence trapped inside it.
As for durability, the average age bit of IKEA furniture is old enough to vote.
> People don't get rid of it because it gets worn out.
That's true, but once you move it around and/or disassemble it it gets very easily damaged, which prevents second-hand use.
> Why would I want to buy furniture that lasts centuries?
Well it's not all just a matter of personal taste. The ecological lifecycle of massive wood kept over generation is much better than throwaway furniture. Very egoistically, you may want to live in a society that values preserving an inhabitable planet. Alternatively, you may appreciate that some people do and that being stuck with the same furniture (among other arrangements) is a small price to pay.
You make it sound like IKEA isn't fit for second hand use. I live in Scandinavia, the classifieds and the second hand furniture shops that do not specifically cater to the vintage crowd, says otherwise. There's a lot of IKEA furniture on the second hand market. Of course it gets second hand use. And if you are in a university city, you can bet that a lot of the furniture students have is on its third or fourth owner.
As for "ecological lifecycle", that's a more complex question than can be expressed in a few paragraphs because one needs to understand what timber is and where it comes from. As well as how it is used.
If this genuinely is a worry of yours then I'd be more worried about what to eat, since the deforestation that actually matters, that of untouched virgin forest, is mostly to produce what ends up on your plate. Mostly beef, but also oil crops etc. The timber in your furniture comes from managed forests. Essentially crops. Of which there is no shortage.
However, there is a shortage of virgin forest. In Europe genuinely untouched forest, which is the kind that matters for biodiversity, is somewhere in the region of 2%. Which is why most Europeans will never see actual virgin forest during their lifetime. The thing they think of as forest is managed plantation with low biological diversity.
(The situation in the US isn't nearly as bad as in Europe. Alaska has mostly virgin forest for instance)
This is why countering deforestation isn't about "just planting trees". If it were about that we wouldn't have a problem because we plant orders of magnitude more trees than we fell in virgin forests. In the US alone about 1.2-1.3 billion seedlings are planted yearly during the planting season. To maintain an equilibrium.
Where I live he amount timber, by volume, has tripled in the past century. The problem isn't that we have too few trees - it is that we are behind on managing their age distribution. 40-45% of the forest where I live is harvest ready. About 10-15% of it is overdue.
(And we haven't even touched on recycling, and the amount of recycled materials found in the products of IKEA and others. Of course, if one has romantic notions of solid wood furniture then one would most likely sneer at products made from recycled wood)
> There's a lot of IKEA furniture on the second hand market.
Anecdata: about half of secondhand IKEA-like furniture i get my hands on is somewhat severely damaged, and about a quarter overall i just throw away. Stats may be different elsewhere, but even talking to other local skippers and ressourcerie workers here in France, the common knowledge is that unless you get it in perfect mint condition, there's no point or resale value in chipboard/plywood furniture.
(this is not just a furniture problem, about 90% of electronics entering a ressourcerie will just end up in the recycling bin because repairing it takes skills, time and resources for very little commercial resale value)
> If this genuinely is a worry of yours then I'd be more worried about what to eat
Good point, i'm not claiming simply stopping to buy IKEA-like products is going to save the planet. There's much much more to do.
> The problem isn't that we have too few trees
I agree overall, although it's often locally wrong: industrial agriculture is displacing a lot of forests and woods which negatively affects the water cycle (a different issue). Here in France deforestation is a real problem and simply keeping concentrated patches of mono-species woods (that you blank cut every X years) isn't helping nature thrive.
> Of course, if one has romantic notions of solid wood furniture then one would most likely sneer at products made from recycled wood
I have conflicting feelings about it. I'm of course very much pro-recycling as a concept. However the current implementation of taking chemical-filled products and chemical-bathing them to produce more chemical-filled products (eg. plastics or chipboard) doesn't exactly sound eco-friendly.
In fact, i'm not even romantic about massive wood furniture. I've more than once almost broke my back on them in staircases, and the price new is crazy. I'd say half of my furniture is massive and half is Ikea/Conforama: 0% has been bought from the original store, 50% has been bought secondhand (the rest found/donated) and no single item cost more than 20€. I don't have bad feelings for my Ikea-style furniture (love my 2 Ikea GNEDBY for the books), i just don't think this industrial production and throwaway-furniture culture is something we should aim for as a society because it's not sustainable.
It's still better to go to an AirBnB and get well known IKEA furniture than the cheaper/low quality/bad look things. But photos immediately reveal that.
A lot of people have the exact opposite desires. There are millions of people who have the exact same things because they saw some influencer recommend it and they thought it was cool. I think it's probably the majority that want to have the same things as everyone else, very few people strive for uniqueness.
I don't think it's just a question of uniqueness. There's still distinct cultures across the planet, which affects architecture, furniture, kitchen equipment (and many other things).
Some people might reasonably expect when traveling thousands of km to find different kitchen styles/utensils/recipes. Not everyone wants to be assimilated in a global tasteless culture. (see also, memes about how late-stage capitalism made everything bland and colorless, from cars to electronics)
I'm not sure building their own furniture is an option for most of the people. I definitely won't do it, ew. Heck, even you aren't doing it, why even recommending it? Yes, flea markets are a budget friendly option, provided you can wait until something passable shows up, and you can arrange transport and putting it up.
I have indeed built my own desk, my own shelving system, my own kitchen layout.
You'd be surprised how easy it is to use a rotary or jig saw once you actually use one.
Of course, one would not have to be so antiseptic about, you know, doing stuff...
Oh, and, just for reference - middle Europe has tons of great second hand furniture opportunities, even still today, in all the major cities. Personal experience helps.
I see my style of thinking and writing everywhere in the world now. What happened?
On a more serious note, and to tie the fun AI comment into the actual discussion: I suppose the types of medium through which people try to express themselves are just very diverse. One person makes a statement through their dinner table, another through their iPhone wallpaper, etc..
I thank you for the gracious compliment, that my writing style reminds of you of the technological marvel of modern machine learning, but I assure you the brogue and tempo were refined long before we had the bits at scale required to match the power of my mind.
Eventually, even IKEA becomes “collectible” and not owned by many people. For example, I can no longer find my beloved (and inappropriately named) “Jerker” line of desks which are great for walking treadmills.
There is also some life stage appropriate utility in its ~disposable entry tier pricing.
For example, having young kids is not a good time to have a nice teak dining room table. (Or new wood floors for that matter) (or really anything nice you don’t want to hide in a locked box or room)
Also, pets, like a cat is wonderful. But without great diligence a more lower mid-tier couch will get clawed up the same as an ikea special. At least it may be more comfortable in the meantime.
I suspect wealth may be having your cake and eating it too—-you have fancy furniture that kids or pets wreck and you file that under dc.
All of it screams for automated materials reprocessing. One can only hope that the collision of robotics and AI will reduce the amount of landfill we create.
>And who buys furniture to pass it on to your kids? Your kids will be unburdening themselves of your old furniture before you are in the ground.
My great grandparents and grandparents did and I appreciate it a ton.
I think modern consumerist culture that has even started to affect buildings with throwaway architecture (because long term thinking doesn't properly fit into the profit motive) is absolutely ghoulish.
> For those of you who look down on IKEA furniture, I'd like to hear about what alternatives you think need mentioning. Especially for young people or people of modest means.
I look in antique/thrift/charity/freecycle/secondhand stores or groups. Where I live you can pick up a solid hardwood dresser for a few hundred bucks, because as you say - nobody wants their parents’ heirlooms. And lots of things can be had for free if you can hire a van to collect.
Also "estate sales/auctions" and/or online returns auctions.
A month ago I got an entire king-size bed headboard (with storage), with cabinets on each side, and a bridge that connects the two cabinets across the top (and has lighting - also there is power in the headboard - needs a few upgrades though).
It was made in 1986 - solid wood.
I paid $1 CAD at an estate sale...
Now, the matching dresser with a tri-fold mirror was $175.
Why the difference? No one wanted the hassle of disassembly for the bed unit - but many felt they could probably flip the dresser.
Admittedly, I had to rent a U-Haul (say about $100 including gas) and rope in a family member to help with the move. (because, it had to be at least 800lbs of awkward parts...)
So, my all in was $276 plus some auction fees.
But - still cheaper, more durable and better looking than most "DIY assembly options".
OTOH - if we move again, this sucker stays with the house...
At least here, you'll also find a lot of IKEA furniture at those stores as well. Most of the nicer stuff tends to go to higher end stores and ends up being rather pricy.
I have had goodluck with this and have gotten many pieces of furniture that will last for the rest of my life used. It is very hit or miss based on your location though and it does restrict your style choices.
> If I pay $5000 for a chair I have reason to expect a lot from it. And more often than not, pricey furniture doesn't actually deliver sufficient quality to be able to defend the price.
That's not the point. A large chunk of the price is the name on it and the marketing/image you associate yourself with. I thin, as engineers, that's hard to relate to. But that is how it works.
The price is not a reflection of quality, it's an outcome of a process to pick a price just enough people are willing to pay.
For years I consistently wore a Seiko around people who had watches that cost more than my car. Proudly. When asked why I didn't have a "proper watch" I'd point out that their swiss masterpiece wasn't nearly as accurate as my cheap quartz watch.
They'd laugh because they knew it wasn't about the accuracy.
And I'd get some satisfaction from the fact that they thought I didn't already know that.
I too own things where the price tag can't be justified by the objective merits of the product. So I do get it. But what they have in common is that these things generally are very good -- but you can get the same level of quality for less. I won't buy a low quality product with a hefty price tag.
Anyway, these days most people around me wear some kind of smart watch. And the funny bit is that the people who own expensive watches now have to choose: show off or practicality :-)
I once paid $3500 for a very deep and low chaise lounger/sofa. It was very high quality. You did have to get used to having your feet on the seat because it was so deep, but it was a great guest bed.
But more importantly, to me, at the time, it looked very cool in my tiny downtown apartment.
Yet you keep seeing people that tell someone off for complaining that a cheap thing broke and that they should have paid more to get quality. Problem is that unless you're an expert with enough time you don't know if your paying for quality or bullshit.
You can easily get better kitchen for example here in Europe, but you have to pay >2x more. Their price/value ratio is stellar usually (but not always). Some designs are great, some are... obscure and I would not want it at home even for free. Taste is eye of the beholder and all that.
One problem is - its sort of take it or leave it. You can't really make custom sized kitchen, you only compose of lego-like bricks of 20-40-60-80cm width and try to cover the inevitable gaps, but they are there. Fine if you don't have constraints, but we do - square-like shape with hard dimensions on all 4 sides. Sloped roof on one side. A lot of custom work and its not perfect, cannot be, its Ikea.
But we got big kitchen for... 11-12k altogether, including artificial stone worktop. Only due to the fact that their sub-contracting company (here in Switzerland!!) messed up first delivery, and white worktop with small black veins came as black with white veins (order came good to factory but out came reverse). Second delivery - each plate was mildly different coloring, so when put together, it looked very cheap and amateurish. Raised with Ikea, after some discussion they offered another one but couldn't guarantee color uniformity. I've chosen another look that would work in any case, but then they seemingly decided cut off that supplier and just returned all the money for worktop, while we kept our current one. Around 5k that was.
Also my massive pet peeve with their kitchen - you have to take their always crappy dishwashers, buying directly say Bosch products won't make them fit well with closing mechanism. I had to throw away perfectly functional Siemens dishwasher and buy their Bosch one. Sounds good, but never ever do Ikea rebrands work the same, offer same quality as originals, don't understand why but even previous time I did that, their Whirlpool-rebrand was crappy, every single device had big issues. That new top of the line (in Ikea) Bosch is massively subpar to older (5 years max) basic Siemens one.
When we did a full renovation, we had the cabinet maker install an Ikea kitchen, with a custom non-Ikea worktop and a small amount of his expertise to adapt it for our non-Ikea dishwasher etc.
This was a massive cost saving on a fully custom kitchen, and let us shift the budget to custom built stairs/bedroom cupboards elsewhere.
I’m not sure I understand this perspective, I’m looking forward to inheriting some of my parents furnitures and getting rid of some of the ikea crap.. they are furniture that have been in the family in some cases for over 200 years, and I learned to maintain them and care for them as a kid just as a regular part of housework. Some have had amusing changes in use as the times changed, like an old wardrobe being turned into a chest of drawers as larger wardrobes became available, etc.
> I’m looking forward to inheriting some of my parents furnitures and getting rid of some of the ikea crap.. they are furniture that have been in the family in some cases for over 200 years, and I learned to maintain them and care for them as a kid just as a regular part of housework.
Your experience is an extreme outlier.
Most people don't have parents with such old, valuable furniture.
Of those who do, most don't value it themselves.
Of those who do, most don't know how to take care of it.
The reality: Kids often live far away, in smaller houses/apartments. They're married and their spouses may not like the old furniture - they've already invested in the furniture they bought. Also, as people get old, they often need to downsize, so they have to get rid of much of the furniture while alive.
When you have 3+ kids, you can hope at least one of the kids will value it. These days, having 3 kids is an outlier.
For me, personally: I just don't like heavy furniture. I wouldn't want to figure out how to get it into my house, positioned where it's needed, and who's going to move it later if I decide to change the layout of my rooms? Pain, pain, pain.
> I’m looking forward to inheriting some of my parents furnitures and getting rid of some of the ikea crap..
I think you are confusing the perspective of the GP here.
Your perspective is that of the "kid". You like the parents' furniture and eventually want to use them and that's all fine.
But GP is describing the parent perspective which, they argue, shouldn't be to plan life such that the kids will be inheriting and using things later. That puts pressure on them to actually do instead of making their own choices. It's a subtle but important difference.
I see similar issues with people buying the neighboring lot and building a second house there such that eventually their kids can move in their with their family, once they have one. Some kids certainly so, and that's great. But think about your own life, would really have wanted to do that? Or grow up feeling that's expected of you? Most of my friends live half a day of travel away from where they grew up. Most of them would despise the idea of moving in next to their parents. Which doesn't mean they don't love them, just that they value their independence and made choices free from the constraint that it needs to be exactly there. (Besides, a couple usually consists of two people and they often didn't grow up in the same neighborhood.)
Generally, trying to plan for leaving inheritances (of substantial value) is overvalued. Modern society is striving to less dynasty building and I think that's a good thing. A lot of the poor/rich divide is rooted in that and governments should discourage it (through inheritance tax) rather than encouraging it (through e.g. lack of actions against housing costs which forces people to get a big inheritance to be able to live anywhere.)
Though I'm really getting too far from the topic as that was about furniture. :)
This is a complex topic and I’m not going to do it justice in a comment, but I feel like modern society might just be destroying social mobility in the name of what you described, while the already rich are dynasty building just fine as usual via a variety of legal means only available to them selves.
Well, play it out in a simulation, what happens if you have two groups of humans, one can build wealth across generations, and infact already have access to better education, food, and the enormous privileged of rolling the dice and failing without suffering extreme consequences. The other group doesn’t, and now on top of it? They can’t work harder to build some wealth and pass it on to their descendants because the “state” legally disincentivises it.
You have in essence legally protected the rich from competition even inter-generationally.
Yes, the tried-and-true first apartment cheap stuff is still there. But the majority of what's for sale in IKEA these days is of significantly better quality (and significantly higher price).
The best alternative to IKEA furniture is more expensive IKEA furniture.
Indeed, Ikea nowadays caters to a range of quality/price optima. Kitchen door finishes make a world of difference in durability and prices. Bedside tables exist with wood-on-plastic-slides drawers - and other models with ball bearing drawers.
Ok so i have varied opinion on this. IKEA is great for getting some stuff quickly and you know what to expect.
The big problem I have with Ikea is it creates a sort of disposable Furniture Industry because quite often people will throw their Ikea Stuff away after the first or second moving. Or not even take it with them. Because it is so easy to get and so cheap.
IKEA is great for stuff where I'm willing to sacrifice some quality for a proportionally large price discount.
But for furniture where quality is more of a concern, and I'm willing to go up a rung on the price ladder, I've been very happy with both Crate & Barrel and Room & Board (noun & noun) here in the US. I have a C&B sectional sofa and quite a few pieces from R&B such as our king size bed, dresser, nightstands, kid's dresser, dining room sideboard cabinet.
They're not $5000 for a single chair range, but $5000 for bed + nightstands + dresser, though you can certainly get stuff for less.
But for "young people or people of modest means" I agree that you probably can't beat IKEA. There certainly are other cheap furniture retailers but you don't really know what you're getting and the style leaves a lot to be desired.
I love IKEA because I could furnish entire office (apart from chairs, they don't have anything of Herman Miller quality) with practical and good looking desks and other fixtures and I didn't spend a fortune. I don't know what it would look like if I had to use other suppliers. Not many showroom if at all, long lead times, often problematic assembly.
> For those of you who look down on IKEA furniture, I'd like to hear about what alternatives you think need mentioning.
Word! My desk at home is a very wide T-shaped desk made of three Kallax and two kitchen countertops: I share it with my wife and there are four monitors, two desktop PC towers (inside modded Kallax), two laptops, one shared printer, etc. and we've still got plenty of room on the desk.
Our chairs: we've each got an Aeron (mine is just out of warranty, 13 years old and the wife's got an used one, don't know how old but older than mine). That's quality stuff (it took me a few minutes to set up correctly: when you put your hands behind your head, an Aeron should lean back and then when you put your hands above the keyboard, it should move forward)... Fun fact: neighbor's kid sat in my chair (by himself, I wasn't offering him to try it) and exclamed "wow, that's a good chair!". My Aeron has already been to four countries with me. The "hit hurts my leg" is bullshit from people who haven't spend the 15 minutes needed to read the manual to set it up correctly.
The one criticism I can offer on IKEA furniture is that some of it doesn't move well, specifically the particle board stuff which will fall apart at the joints if it's not carefully handled.
Having said that, I also tend to not buy the particle board stuff.
I'd prefer it if IKEA offered more options (dimensionally) on their durable furnishings.
I think what the parent commenter means is that the screws might not screw back the same way after, because that mirrors my experience with a lot of their furniture too.
> But IKEA is more often than not more than sufficient quality.
I am not so sure about that. There are some product lines that are somewhat OK price/quality e.g. IVAR seems to be OK. But most IKEA products are too much optimized optimized on the cost side for my taste. The good days of "wooden furniture" is over.
> And who buys furniture to pass it on to your kids? Your kids will be unburdening themselves of your old furniture before you are in the ground.
This highly depends on the furniture. As an example, my dad built some custom pieces out of solid oak that are absolutely finding a place in my house after he's gone.
Your father did not buy those so that isn't a counterexample to what the GP said. Clearly, something your father made with his own hands will have a different value to something he bought.
I think most people who are critical of IKEA would be fine with cheap carboard furniture, if it weren't for their unethical practices hinging on corruption in developing countries. I recently learned of their practices of clearing old growth forests and was quite ashamed for falling for their greenwashing campaign. I won't be buying their products anytime soon.
Danish furniture started being fashionable (among the young adult market) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. That was veneered with actual wood. I still have my kitchen table that I bought in the mid 80s. Later styles adopted laminated Melamine, which is the current fashion among young adults.
> If I pay $5000 for a chair I have reason to expect a lot from it.
My parents had a leather wingback chair made in the late 80s. They paid around $2500. I use it still. There are some tears in the seating, but for something that's lasted 40 years,
Doesn't mean it has aesthetic merit (which was my point). The design language is derivative mix (copies of decades old scandinavian originals, adopting of this or that famous design language like mid-century modern, globalized minimal viable design), basically substituting a ready-made corporate taste for the buyer's own - the very opposite of aesthetics.
If IKEA has an "aesthetic" it's in the trivial sense that everything designed has one, the same way a fast food meal is a culinary artifact as every other prepared meal is, doesn't mean it has culinary (or even nutritional) value.
>For those of you who look down on IKEA furniture, I'd like to hear about what alternatives you think need mentioning. Especially for young people or people of modest means.
I don't know about Europe, but a drive through most SFH residential areas in the US and you will score more usable furniture than you could ever need (skipping mattresses, fabric couches, etc...). At my last home, I ditched a lot of furniture by leaving it out front and never had to wait more than a day to have it gone. Failing that, there are a plethora of thrift shops with dirt cheap furniture (and other household goods). And if you want something more classy, go to antique shops loaded with cool oak furniture that is out of style so isn't worth much anymore.
Compare that to the obnoxious particle board Ikea crap that is the antithesis of buy it for life (and thus TCO is terrible).
> There was a lot of what we call "cabin furniture" - which isn't made to look good, just be practical.
I thought that is what IKEA is.
But like, I hate the modern trend of turning "aesthetic" into synonym of "unpractical and uncomfortable". At this point, when I hear "it looks good" I just assume it will be unpractical.
Nitpick but solid wood furniture does not weigh more than the particleboard furniture from Ikea.
Also, my 2 cents, but it is high time for a return to utilitarianism in furniture. Just getting a basic leather sofa without cup holders and other e-garbage is a huge pain. (Ironically, Ikea is ok for this.)
> Nitpick but solid wood furniture does not weigh more than the particleboard furniture from Ikea.
What is this special space time dilation wood you found? If its made of hardwood it will be a lot heavier. If it weights similarly and its solid wood is usually very soft and will live as long or less than IKEA furniture.
100% wood is way heavier, even the lighter variant.
Interesting note... I recently disassembled an IKEA cupboard from 1999 made from MDF. It was definitely much heavier than their MDF products (eg. Metod kitchen cabinets) from today.
There has been quite some changes on the construction of IKEA furniture within the last 30 years. There was an interesting video that I cant remember the name anymore about this.
It depends. Solid particleboard is pretty close, but a many Ikea pieces are hollow, with internal cardboard support. I prefer some of these to particle board because of the lightness. Like the Lack or the Linnmon table tops.
You do need to have some combination of money, time, a car, patience, taste, willingness to inspect things in person, and owned housing to care about a piece of furniture that's "not from IKEA". For a normal person who wants their rented apartment to be livable like... now, it is probably the only good choice. People are so quick to talk crap about it when their only decent options outside of it are either "designer furniture" they cannot afford, custom made furniture they don't have the vision for (but also can't afford), or "eclectic pieces" from "thrift stores" that only unemployed hobbyist or people who own their apartments can afford (in terms of time). I really dislike that.
If only they had avoided XML. XML drove away a lot of people who would otherwise have been interested early on.
(I once found myself in the same meeting as two of the people who made the mistakes that meant you couldn’t just pipe stuff through an XML parser and hope it worked. I tend to speak my mind)
I think it depends on how you work and what the application does. When I'm in a flow state I need things that are fast. GUIs, even on my relatively fast mac are not terribly fast. They take more time to start. They require more screen real-estate, and more management of same.
For something to become a GUI app (or a web-based UI) the GUI needs to offer something more valuable than a TUI can offer in terms of interaction.
I have one TUI app that wrote a while back to keep track of what I work on. It started off as a "wizard"-style UI. You choose project, then subproject, day, hours, activity and then hours and comment in a sequence of steps.
Arrow keys -> enter -> arrow keys -> enter .... -> comment -> enter
It takes about 2-3 seconds for me to do. And this is a time-sensitive task: if it isn't fast the user will not do it as often. There is a web interface to do the same thing, but the backend is slow. My TUI utility speeds that up by caching (between sessions) the things that the web UI has to look up (slowly) every time.
Then I wrote a more involved UI for it that "looks more like an application". Result? Now we were up to 15-20 seconds of interacting. Oh year it could do more and it certainly looked better, but it was less efficient so I noticed that I would postpone using it to record what I was doing. Because it now had friction. Lots of it. So a couple of weeks later I just did a hard reset and went back to the wizard style, minimalist version.
I would make a web UI, but that would burn 2-3 seconds just to navigate the browser there, juggle tabs (which I have too many of already), find the right browser to open the tab in etc. Once there do I keep it for "faster access" or close the tab? Keeping it is almost always the wrong thing.
There's a reason I have perhaps 15 different tools in my garage that can attach to a given fastener size. And there's a reason for that. Not all 19mm bolts are treated the same way. Some are low torque and live in tiny spaces. Some require precise fastening torque. Some need a lot of force to come loose - some will only come loose with force and I'm okay with destroying them. This is why I have so many tools that all do essentially the same job: apply rotational force to a piece of metal that has a standardized interface.
Similar tasks are not always best solved with the same tool because the context and the details do matter. Same goes for UIs. There are some things TUIs are very good at. Not least portability and remote usability.
Doesn’t just mean the model has picked up on what happens when two graybeards who still wear cargo shorts meet and one utters a declarative sentence? :-)
...and then the "colonies" figured out how to weaponize it and turn the balance in their favor.
Or, not quite: the workers are being exploited just like they were during the colonial period. But at least now their rulers have power over our rulers that they didn't have before. So they get to be happy about that as they make novelty items out of toxic plastic for Temu.
Modern China is a vastly better place to live than China of 60+ years ago. Many countries are nicer places to live, but 1+ Billion people are simply better off making the “exploitation” narrative ridiculous.
How about before it was partitioned into colonies of various European powers? Population of China 60 years ago was half what it is now (700 Million).
Anyway, the answer is both. They were being exploited 60+ years ago, and they're still being exploited now, regardless of if they can take the train away from the factory that they work at to visit their relatives over the holidays.
China’s population was absolutely fucked over by the CCP to a level that is hard to comprehend. That had nothing directly to do with any foreign powers, but because Chinese workers became valuable to foreign markets their lives massively improved.
The government is still horrible, that’s unlikely to change but foreign markets aren’t the issue.
It can both be better than 60 years ago and worse than what you would consider a «good» life. Exploitation and being less poor are not mutually exclusive.
It is easier to think poor quality of life is ok for people you cannot identify with.
In living memory things when from famine so bad cannibalism was a widespread issue, to traffic jams. You can’t argue about quality of life here outside of profound ignorance.
The CCP was objectively the worst government across thousands of years, and foreign markets didn’t fix the underlying problems but they helped the general population in a way the government was never going to without them.
Porque no los dos? Given the number of billionaires in China, it can both be true that workers are exploited, meaning they could earning more for less hours, and that the living conditions are better on average and possibly medianely than the local minima of 1966.
1960 was way worse than 1966. My point was you can’t reasonably look at thousands of years of horror suddenly ending and then blame the solution for not being perfect.
For the most part I am thankful that the EU regulates things strictly. As long as I am the consumer of what is regulated and not the maker. Because while the regulation is well meaning, it is not always effective or efficient. And sometimes it achieves absolutely no positive results.
And yet, I am generally for regulating a lot of things.
For instance the cookie-popup-horseshit is failed regulation that came about mainly because regulators were squeamish about real solutions that would have required constant judgement calls. Instead of posing an existential risk to companies that run roughshod over our privacy, they created impotent regulation that is a dual failure: it protects exactly nobody and it wastes everyone's time multiple times over.
Companies that do bad things should face existential risks. It is the only mechanism that works. Fines only work for small players. For large players it is surprisingly often a calculation where the numbers dictate you DO bad things because the downside risk is mostly quantifiable and financially acceptable.
Yes, sanctioning companies guilty of egregious violations of privacy would have been noisy, but it would have been the right thing to do. And it would have been cheaper and more effective than what we have today.
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