I stopped reading after the author suggested that IKEA furniture be illegal.

I love IKEA. The furniture is designed to be really easy to put together; if you do something wrong, it simply doesn't fit. This shows that a lot of thought is put into each piece of furniture, and that makes me happy.

(Yes, sometimes I try to put something together incorrectly to make sure that I can't be misunderstanding the instructions. With cheap furniture, it will fit together fine and be wrong. With IKEA furniture, it becomes immediately obvious that you are doing it wrong. You simply can't continue until you do it right.)

Anyway, to me, IKEA furniture is kind of addictive. I love getting a box of particle board (+) and then, with just a little bit of instruction-following, having a solid piece of furniture. It's almost as fun as Lego! (I am almost disappointed when I am done putting it together. Yeah, now I have a functional piece of furniture that will make my life slightly more enjoyable. But ... putting it together was so fun, I'm upset that it's over.)

I also like how the styles and colors fit together, and how it is minimalist with just a touch of "design". I love IKEA.

(+) A lot of people whine about the quality. If you buy the super-cheap stuff, yeah, the quality is low. If you buy the mid-range or high-end stuff, though, the quality is great. There's a reason some of their furniture comes with a 25 year (!) warranty. They expect it to last for 25 years. From what I've seen, it does.

You can pry my allen wrench from my cold, dead hands.

I think you may have misread it. Megan McArdle more or less agrees with you because though she might not like Ikea furniture for herself she absolutely believes you should be able to buy cheap(er)/discount furniture and that it's good for everyone. McArdle's debating the author of Cheap (https://www.amazon.com/dp/159420215X) who believes otherwise.

I am saying that I like IKEA regardless of price. I think it's a place to get functional, well-designed, and pretty furniture. I like the design better than the "nice" stuff.

So "discount" doesn't factor into it.

25 years is not very long for furniture! I have several pieces in my apartment older than that -- made of real wood, full of character, and which I paid little or nothing for.

I've had IKEA stuff but I enjoy having furniture with history so much more. I recently acquired (for nothing) a huge, old wood desk that belonged to a CEO. There's a cabinet door on the side, out of which comes a mechanical shelf that I'm guessing was once used for a typewriter. Fascinating!

Given, it's hard to get ahold of the right furniture if you're not willing to pay much. But I've been slowly replacing my particle board with real wood, and spending less than I did on the fake stuff. It just takes time.

"I stopped reading after the author suggested that IKEA furniture be illegal."

Where exactly was that?

(Whether you like her or not, she's not someone who mistakes "I don't like it" for "It should be illegal".)

"Where exactly was that?"

As you point out in your book, Ikea furniture is not quite as adorably minimalist as its marketing implies. Making a whole bunch of disposable furniture places certain stresses on natural resources, not all of which are renewable, or, arguably, even legal.

The implication is that IKEA furniture is built from resources that are not legal (whatever that means), and is, as a result, itself not legal. I guess...

>life's ambition is never again to spend four hours messing around with an allen wrench

4 hours? So its still fashionable to pretend that you have no engineering or practical aptitude! Imagine reading the atlantic and claiming you didn't understand theatre or poetry

Usually when I hear this complaint (on putting things from IKEA together), it's not a problem with putting things together in general, but allen wrench usage in particular that gets them. I'm not sure why—maybe the fact that the process is reversible and doesn't involve making holes in wood makes the constructor feel like they're playing with Lego rather than actually "building" something?

I think it's just lazy journalism. Along the lines of - oh I'm so sensitive an artistic and creative I'm no good at anything mechanical.

A power drill + a few allen wrench bits makes the process feel a lot manlier. :-)

Allen wrenches are the least usable types of wrenches or screwdrivers I've ever used. I always end up skinning my knuckles.

IKEA should develop and sell a better allen wrench.

I recently put together some trestle leg table/desk supports from them. The included, sort-of-S-shaped allen wrench worked just fine. Actually, I was impressed at how well it worked combined with its minimalist design.

I'd be cautious using a drill/power driven allen bit. The wood in my trestles is not the hardest, and I can see where too much power too quickly could damage it before one's reaction time caught up with events. If you are cautious, things should be fine. If you just set a torque limit and fire away, you could end up unhappy.

I'd like an allen wrench bit for a traditional hand-powered screwdriver. Though one of those low-power electric screwdrivers we use at my work to install rack-mount equipment into racks might work OK too (if it had an allen wrench bit).

There are handheld / hand-driven screwdrivers that have replacable... bits, I guess one would call them. I have one that switched between large and small blade and Phillips heads. Now that I check, I also have an inexpensive Husky screwdriver/bit set that was a Secret Santa gift; it has hex bits, though I haven't used them.

I'd think before using it for IKEA assembly, though. For the trestles, the screws required significant torque to penetrate. Applying that repeatedly for these not too short screw, by using one's wrists and a screwdriver grip, I imagine would quickly become tiring. A nice thing about the IKEA "throw-away" wrench is that its S shape allows one to create significant torque with a finger grip, lessening strain on / torsion of the wrist.

A friend outfitted his apartment with IKEA and it took 4 MIT engineering students 3 hours to complete it all.

You know how IKEA has those showcases, and some of them are complete apartments with nothing but IKEA in them? 12 man-hours would be impressive to put one of those together.

I have an alan wrench bit for my drill / driver. Minimize one bottleneck, then work on the next ;)

Friendly FYI: That's "Allen" wrench.

Having owned a bunch of older and newer Ikea stuff, the real problem IMHO is Ikea knockoffs. If you're willing to buy actual wood, Ikea sells it and it works fine--it's not especially decorative but it is at least decent at being tables/beds/whatever.

However, if you're in the market for a bookcase, say, and decide $100 is too much to pay for one, your choices are all bad particle board with melamine poorly installed. If you're very lucky they last a year. Ikea makes this too, but I'm convinced it's because they felt they had to compete with the purveyors of this junk.

Older Ikea stuff tends to be made with wood and actually holds up pretty well--I have a pair of 30-40 year old Ikea end tables that are perfectly stable and usable, although not pretty.

Believe it or not IKEA is probably the most ethical and hacker oriented large-scale company currently around. They don't scam people into buying stuff which breaks and needs to be replaced, they retain customers by offering something to everybody while at the same time introducing fashion and trends which makes people want to buy new stuff. Insider tip: use ordinary glue when you put together furniture. You know how solid all the furniture seems when you try out at IKEA and you don't really get the same feeling when you put it together yourself? Well, guess what.

Don't glue it up if you want to be able to take it apart to move however. Several of Megan's commenters said one of the particular things they liked about IKEA is that they could disassemble and reassemble it easily.

I've always found a little wood glue and some strategically placed screws can make cheap furniture pretty durable.

And a torque-adjustable drill with an allen bit can make the assembly pretty quick!

And pretty fun after a few beers!

Dunno if it's true, but a PR flak who worked with IKEA USA told me that their fall catalog (which is distributed worldwide more-or-less identically) is the second most-printed publication every year after the bible.

It's supposedly also the worlds biggest photo shoot and the worlds biggest studio.

All I really get from this is that the author doesn't like cheap furniture. Which is fine... she can buy her furniture somewhere else, or build it herself.

Megan McArdle is saying there's nothing wrong with buying Ikea (or any discount) furniture despite what Ellen Ruppel Shell argues in her new book "Cheap" (https://www.amazon.com/dp/159420215X)

Shell argues that buying Ikea (and our "discount" society as a whole) is immoral and costly.

Yeah, I was kind of puzzled too. Cheap furniture is of lower quality than expensive furniture is... you don't say?

I don't really get what the problem is. It's not an all or nothing deal — you can buy some items from Ikea and the rest of your stuff from somewhere else.