Maybe 10 years ago, I bought an Ikea dresser for my bedroom and spent too much of a Saturday assembling it. At the time, I had some buyer's regret for not just having splurged on some expensive hardwood piece. But know what? It looks nice enough and does its job just fine.

And I have a couple modernish Ikea chairs in another room which look quite nice and are very comfortable.

I'm sure Ikea has bad stuff and better stuff and I only go every 2-3 years but don't really have complaints.

Ikea's was all sold out. Really well designed piece, folds up nicely.

All other folding outdoor dining sets are sold online only and have terrible reviews. Horrible horrible reviews.

It turns out the price point for dining sets is as follows:

1. Whatever random product Target is selling this year for $100

2. Random product at Home Depot, which probably isn't in stock, for $250-$500, quality unknown.

3. Reasonable quality well designed piece at Ikea for $500

4. Costco's $2000 set.

Ikea continues to success for very good reasons.

I had the same experience with a belt clip for a knife by CRKT. 25+ year old knife discontinued who knows how long ago, and they sent me replacement parts free of charge.

Good customer support wins customers, which I suspect is why many like IKEA.

For the moment. They are on the brink of bankruptcy. They may yet avoid it but it's gonna be close.

The “war psychology” resonates with me, but I can’t stand spending time in an IKEA store; the experience is draining and frustrating, while everything they sell is disposable, cheap, off-gassing melamine and fiberboard.

It breaks quickly, and you find yourself back at IKEA buying another cheap furniture piece.

When I was young and poor, I hated IKEA even more after wasting time and hard-earned money there.

Instead, I started buying used, high-quality furniture, made of natural materials, from second-hand furniture stores.

Just as affordable, more durable, more enjoyable to own, and I was able to sell/give it on when I was less poor.

They did open up the shortcut after a few months though.

I once broke my iPad at Ikea out of tiredness (put it on an instable shelf while arguing with my partner).

It’s designed to make you tired, to make you argue with your partner, to make your kids run around and want things, and to make you slow down when you need to finish quickly. Ikea is designed to give you, in fine, a bad experience.

Ikea sells plenty of real solid wood products, but even their mid-tier chip board book shelves last.

Ikea's light fixtures are also a good deal. Bonus that they don't use soldered in LED lights, which I've seen many cheap and even mid priced light fixtures starting to do.

Ikea's signature POÄNG chair, those things last forever.

Ikea is also often the only place that sells furniture with a clean look. At least in the Pacific NW of the US, my choices for furniture shopping are:

1. Ikea, cheap, quality ranging from meh to decent.

2. Macy's Home store and other of the ilk, horribly ugly furniture with quality ranging from decent to not too bad.

3. HOLY SHIT expensive furniture stores selling good looking stuff like CB2.

4. LOLWTFBBQ expensive furniture stores like restoration hardware, selling ugly ass shit that is of quality ranging from "not too bad" to "pretty good."

Last time I visited Vancouver BC I was very jealous of their furniture stores. :(

It's actually a shame they don't focus more on perfecting their offerings.

Some items get redesigned too often. Especially the melamine off-gassing stuff referred to by the parent post.

Agreed, last drawer I bought from them I shoved activated charcoal bags in for over a week and left the drawers open, eventually they stopped smelling.

Also the quality of their press board / chip board has dropped dramatically over the years. 20 years ago items in the Malm line were a lot heavier and could survive multiple moves. Last time I picked up a piece of a Malm bed, it felt nearly hollow.

My theory is there is some kind of fashion season progression for furniture, perhaps based on stuff they use on reality shows or trendy waiting rooms or something. That is the "cutting edge" designs (made nowhere particularly noteworthy and using nothing special in terms of materials) at repugnant prices.

I've been looking at Ikea for kitchen cabinets and while there are some shops that'll do comparable quality Ikea has most of them beat on price, drawer hardware, and ease of discovery. I was thumbing through one catalog that had a whole formula to figure out how much your cabinet would cost. With Ikea the prices are right there and they're generally lower than comparable quality RTA stuff from other brands. Plus the warranty is better and installation is less fiddly.

There's just not a lot out there that's just a little bit better than Ikea. There's Ikea and then there's high end stuff.

When the movers came with our container, I checked the dimensions on the actual IKEA bed we had bought in Singapore: It was smaller than the European version, and fit perfectly into the bedroom.

That particular chair I had was the same everywhere. I moved mine from Australia to the UK and got the new wheel there. Pretty sure it’s the same globally as I went to Shenzhen to visit a supplier a few years later and noticed the boardroom had very familiar seating!

(It was a ‘Markus’)

Things like tables I've generally felt to be of decent quality. Their kitchen fittings tend to be good enough quality to make it through their 10 year warranty.

Actually, speaking of warranties, I was just in an Ikea store in The Netherlands after moving here from the USA, and there was a large sign on the wall in the couch section proclaiming the 10 year warranty on all of their couches. So it seems they are trying to make some key products last.

I also bought some cheap plastic shelves with wheels for my new tiny Dutch bathroom. I don't expect the wheels to still roll in a year. I bought what I think it supposed to be a wire mesh "filing cabinet" (it's tiny!) to use as shoe storage in the entry way and I expect it to start rusting next year. But it was €20 and I just made an international move and money is tight atm.

You get what you pay for I think. $40 bookshelves? Not making it through a move. This model[0] however, will likely hold up fine. It looked sturdy when I saw it in the store last week.

0: https://www.ikea.com/nl/en/p/hemnes-bookcase-red-stained-lig...

They're not a cheap option, considering. I was looking at them a few weeks ago thinking I should either have spent more on something more robust or looked at options elsewhere.

As for IKEA's store plan, I've long suspected the really cheap products are loss leaders to get people into the stores. The majority of products - like Hemnes - are far more expensive but still budget-or-just-over quality.

And there are always a few items, like premium persian rugs, which are far more expensive than equivalents elsewhere. I expect IKEA makes most of its money from higher margins on the just-over products.

The wife wanted a bookshelf so we bought a Billy for €40. I was watching a couple YouTube videos about making them a bit sturdier with glue and extra nails, so I'll probably take a stab at that this weekend when I assemble it.

Re: loss leaders, of course! They serve a €1 breakfast (with "free" coffee if you're a member, which is also free) at the store nearest me. It's an egg, cheese, and a small bread roll. Not much, but I'm paying at least €1 for bread at the local café to go with my €3 latte. The cube shelves are ridiculously cheap and really quite sturdy for most models but you pay out the nose for the cloth cubes to slot into the shelf. Want a door and a drawer to fit in one cube? That'll be half the price of the full shelf.

I think the other half of the problem here is an ignorance of the business model and marketing by consumers. If you expect a €20 shelf to last forever, you're in for a bad time. If you're a college student or a young family starting out in life and need some stuff to get through the next few years, Ikea is probably a decent option.

https://www.ikea.com/us/en/newsroom/corporate-news/safety-an...

Ikea is providing longer, presumably stronger, pins free of charge.

In any case the 48 cm wide unit is listed as having a 15 kg limit per shelf, the 89 cm wide units are rated at 30 kg. Fifteen kilos of hardback books is potentially a lot less than one might expect.

I'm sitting next to a Billy that's nearly 2 decades and 4 moves old.

You can sometimes easily reinforce the weak parts, like screwing brittle backs of shelves on the main structure, with large repair washers else it doesn't hold.

In my experience used furniture prices are all about the local supply and demand. In some places, the prices are horrific for anything,p eople are selling cheap Ikea stuff on craigslist above retail. In other places, people are practically giving it away.

Personally, I like it every now and then, but it is exhausting, or expensive, or both.

Is it the best design? Of course not, but it’s one that you and most people can also afford at all stages of life including our high school and college years. in many cases it neither looks nor feels cheap. At the very least, it looks decent and is functional for a fair amount of time

The layout is fine for a mooch, if you go for 1 specific thing, it's terrible.

It’s also great because she can basically “do all the activities” at IKEA, she can see all the furniture, go into all the display rooms, and even the dining area is wide open and accessible.

She just turned four and her favorite part is the “turbo boosts” where I give her a good push and she careens down the aisles at IKEA, using her brakes to stop herself. Braking is a super important skill for a little girl in a wheelie!