As I see it though, what IKEA displaced wasn’t the family owned expert artisans manufacturing built to order furnitures.
It was piss poor, badly designed, actual shitty materials, poor country labor intensive flat packs.
When I was a kid my family bought cheap mass produced furniture from shopping malls, the looks were fine, it came from Vietnam or China [0], and the quality was laughably bad. Finished product would be slightly crooked. Screws slightly loose. Smell terrible. And people would have that “what did you expect for that price” grin. [1]
I can’t imagine employees were treated in a stellar way either, we heard scandals after scandals about third world factories, and the quality itself was a testament to how much humans were involved in all of that.
So, I see IKEA as a provider of somewhat decent furnitures instead of shitty ones, most other parameters staying the same (they don’t, I genuinely think they’re not worse than the 80s~90s post colonialist euro companies)
[0] how the table turned, quality wise…
[1] to address the obvious “why didn’t they buy more expensive furniture that could have lasted way longer instead”…the answer is simple: upfront money. The same reason people don’t buy 5 story apartment buildings even if that would bring them more money in the long term.
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness."
If your country (cough-cough USA) had already descended into the "crap products globalisation stage" before IKEA came along, it will feel like a net positive.
If your country (cough-cough Sweden) got IKEA before that stage, I would say, yes, IKEA displaced quality furniture.
I'd say the overall problem is un-accounted for externalities. Cheap crap from China or Vietnam is just a symptom of the same illness.
Crappy products are okay, in a free market economy. But crappy products with huge environmental costs undercutting "kosher" crappy products, is not okay.
What use are even labour and environmental laws if one can skirt them by pushing the problem elsewhere?
If you want to go into Ikea and just buy long lasting solid wood products, go ahead! Indeed I'd argue Ikea has made new solid wood furniture more accessible, heck sometimes new Ikea wood furniture is cheaper than consignment store wood furniture!
I've seen (and own) some solid wood furniture from IKEA. I'm usually an IKEA defender (see another post I just made on this thread).
I would not describe their solid wood furniture as "nice". Given the way they tend to assemble even small members from multiple small scraps of wood glued together rather than single pieces, I think calling them "solid" is even a bit of a stretch, at least in some cases. They're also made out of fairly soft wood, usually, and barely finished, if at all.
A bit the same way so many corporations are “carbon neutral” through offset, even if it’s a scam under most of these.
IKEA using it’s position to do something could be a realistic solution, I just don’t know if there is much hope in that regard.
The coffee scene could be a exemple where traceability helps a lot to improve the market (as a consumer there are options to do the right thing for non crazy prices), while the global picture stays grim as the most sold coffee will always be the unmarked super market value pack.
Worker protection: same as for Amazon, I wish they rapidly advance their robotization programs. In the meantime I strongly support more regulation, and would like security and social policies baked into the prices, especially as I don’t think there would be that much actual impact. Just as wish more companies across the board get unions.
If we change the ecosystem, other companies would evolve to be the winners. (Or IKEA and Amazon would change.)
I say that as a sample of the population who deeply wants the bland, blank slate aesthetic in reaction to the rococo and non-modular furniture I had to deal with in other people’s home and surroundings.
Paradoxally, I am sure it will come back as a reaction to people like me, and next gnerations might want to get back to their roots and resurface diverse and culturally more anchored styles. When it does, I hope they’ll have small production tools (home grade cnc mills ?) to do so in small batches at low cost, and get crazy with the stuff they make.
It's usually most or all of: hideous; difficult to assemble (why people complain about IKEA when basically every other player in their market is far worse, I do not understand); worse-made than IKEA furniture; still, somehow, more expensive than the IKEA equivalent.
IKEA's about the best option out there for people who don't have a lot of money and also would rather not furnish their home with cheap antiques from the 1920s (go much newer, or much older, and it starts getting expensive), having to do a lot of DIY re-upholstering in the process if they want anything with cloth on it.