Another point of view: the IKEA cardboard honeycomb material is AWESOME!
It's made from recycled material, it doesn't weigh anything, it's very strong when compared to weight and price, the surface is pretty resilient and it doesn't produce a lot of waste when it is inevitably discarded.
In today's single use culture (which needs to go away) it would be a terrible waste of resources to use nice hardwood to build cheap coffee tables that get swapped out when the fashion changes.
You can still get hardwood furniture that will last several lifetimes. It will make you feel a little lighter in the pocket, but you buy once and cry once.
With ikea a kid can get his own setup, brand new and age appropriate.
Princess or racecar bed when they're young. bed with a desk underneath when they're getting to homework age, full sized bed when they reach 90th percentile. All with matching extras, and not too much money.
By the way, have you noticed the price and quality of furniture store furniture (when they're not "going out of business"?) A lot of it is either 10x ikea price or only 4x but still made with fiberboard underneath.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/06/us/ikea-dresser-lawsuit-s...
https://www.newsweek.com/why-are-these-ikea-dressers-killing...
and many many more
If the surface coating gets damaged or the surface gets pierced or it becomes waterlogged from spills or environmental humidity, it will quickly go bad. But they're pretty resilient to normal household use.
You get what you pay for. A LACK honeycomb table costs 7€. What can you expect at this price?
I think I was neither, as I repeated it three times and always got the same result (I was moving every couple of years, so I threw out the crooked desk top when moving and bought identical one in a new place). Eventually, I stopped getting those $40 honeycomb desk tops and got a wooden one, from IKEA as well (made not from solid wood, but from sort of glued together mosaic of small wood pieces, don't know what it's called) for around $100, which is still good as new after 8 years of usage.
- IKEA will only accept things in decent-ish condition and will (if necessary) refurbish and resell them.
- you get a voucher, not cash
So an assumption that they try to kill the second hand market seems absurd - on the contrary they become a marketplace for good-condition second hand products AND get people into the store with a voucher in hand (which means they might spend even more to buy something and like many vouchers may also end up unclaimed).
So no nefariousness here, just good business sense. Nonetheless having used options in the store, allowing you to decide to take that shelf new for 130 or that used one for 70 seems to me as a net gain for everyone.
"Good business sense" seems to rarely correlate with benefits for society these days, so it's wise to be skeptical.
Why? If you get a better price in the second hand market and someone will pick it up from your home, why would you sell it back to Ikea.
Also convenience.
Expedit and Kallax have different size, German description: https://new-swedish-design.de/de/blog/expedit-vs.-kallax-reg...
Yes, but Kallax is IKEA's official replacement for Expedit.
As an aside, if you ever buy the same piece of Ikea furniture a few years later it's interesting to see what has been changed.
As a bit of a hobbyist wood worker, Ikea furniture is slightly soul destroying. It's often more expensive to buy the wood stock materials than it is to buy the finished Ikea piece.
Well, yes, we're back to supply chains here; just as on digikey you might find that the unit price for 1x an item is twice the unit price for 100x or even 10x, the supply chain to bring you a tiny quantity of wood to enjoy the premium experience of being a craftsman is quite expensive compared to anything mass-produced. You are paying for the experience of making it yourself.
(And this is before we get into relative wood pricing between countries; it took me a long time to understand why America had all those wood-framed and paneled houses while they're virtually absent in the UK, and of course it's because the local old forests were depleted in previous centuries. To the point where there was a whole pre-20th century peasant architecture of stone houses with only a single piece of serious lumber in: the roof beam.)
You may well be right about the reason traditional British houses are made of stone and brick. However, if you watch a new build house going up you may well be surprised to see that the structure of the house is entirely wood framed (often mostly off site). The floors and the roof are all held up by the wood framework. A brick facade is then installed and tied into the wood framework.
A big reason most of our (non custom made) furniture is IKEA is because it strikes a pretty ideal balance between price and quality and allows you to "get to town" with changes. Most other "crap furniture" does not at all support such modifications to it. For starters because some of the things we bought even though they said solid wood on the label did not actually fully consist of solid wood and were useless after cutting off a piece.
We have the 'same' dresser bought three times in three different years. The first one is pretty solid wood, the second one is more particle board, but still decent, the newest one is much flimsier and much more lightweight particle board and is actually falling apart while the two older ones are still going strong.
Don’t tell me about it. I built an Enzo Mari bookshelf and afterwards realised I had built an IKEA Ivar but spent the double price in wood.
Probably depends what you buy. If you buy the cheap-as-chips stuff, you get wha you pay for.
I would like to see some evidence on this. I read this all the time and it does not reflect my experiences.
I bought my first house a few years ago and started to look for more serious furniture. I spent months looking for a good cabinet for my TV + consoles + storage, but could't find anything. I buckled and went for an ikea setup in the end, using their design tool to come up with something really neat and affordable. I mean yeah it's particle board, but it looks good and will be just fine for the next ten years.
People now want to be able to afford new furniture every 5-10 years, cardboard one is not the issue if it is designed to look good.
Minority of people would buy furniture 10x expensive that lasts 10x longer then the cardboard one (I wouldn't).
That being said, I'm not super into fast fashion / 'influencer culture', either, so maybe I'm in the minority here?
It would make sense on many business levels (e.g. I'd image negative impact of flimsyness growing almost exponentially with each year a bad product stays in the catalogue, designing for cheap or sturdy being muchbless costly than designing for cheap and sturdy and so on), but I have no idea if Ikea are good enough to consider that consciously (I do think they'd at least be closer top that level than most others)
"Used old IKEA furniture was made from wood and had some level of quality." - They still make furniture out of solid wood. I just bought some nicer solid wood bookshelves from them. You have to pay a bit more, but that should go without saying. You're probably not paying more than what you would have payed back in the day when taking inflation into account.
I wouldn't presume what's more sustainable in the culture we have today. Making something out of solid wood, and having it thrown away after 20 years because it wasn't fashionable, or wasn't taken care of properly, could easily be way worse than making something out of veneer, wood fiber and cardboard if it's used for at least 10 years.
"Current new things there are made from paper!!!" - Yeah, some things are. So what? In my experience they're still engineered to do the job they need to do for as long as you need it to. I know there's cardboard core in a coffee table and some wall shelves I have. I've taken the shelf down and up several times without issues, and pushed it quite hard to test it, since I knew my kids might try to pull on it.. it was just fine. Kids have been jumping on the coffee table without problems. If you can get sufficient strength with less materials, why not? You have to be DAMN sure that the table will be used for 50+ years if you're going to make it out of a more resource intensive solid hard-wood.
"New IKEA things can’t be moved, because assembling and disassembling them does not work anymore. " - Uh, I just disassembled and reassembled a not very old cabinet made of wood fiber from IKEA. It was fine.
The article stated that the furniture should be returned without disassembling it. At my local IKEA I can rent a van for just 3 hours for a very low price, that should fit a couple of bookshelves without disassembling them.
I don't think the idea that we should make everything out of solid wood and have it last for 100 years is actually sustainable today. We're resource-constrained today, making everything out of solid wood would put a huge strain on the environment at a time where it's already under extreme pressure. The population in western countries is already starting to decline, so I don't see the point of sacrificing the environment today to reduce resource consumption in 50+ years. I don't think it's likely that solid wood furniture will be exported to Africa and South-East Asia where there will be population growth in the coming decades either.
Edit: paper furniture isn’t new and secret. Old article about it: https://gizmodo.com/and-now-ikea-is-making-sofas-out-of-pape...