Because that 2 lifetimes table doesnt cost $800 thats what grandma paid for it in the 50s when buying a 4 bedroom house for $30,000 and working at the mill for 50 years was normal.
It also weighs 3 tons and given that you live in a shitty 1 bedroom apartment and have to move every 6 months to an even smaller shoebox that costs an increasing % of your income every damn time, Its probably for the best that your shit is disposable.
I make and restore wood furniture. I have taken plenty of “all wood” furniture apart, repaired it, or just salvaged whatever actual wood scraps I could find.
Whatever idiot wrote this has no idea how expensive true wood furniture is. There is hardly ANY actual wood furniture in the market, PERIOD. You think it’s wood, but it’s veneered ply or fiberboard. That is the state of the entire industry, not just IKEA. This is a simple fact of life in a world that has already been heavily deforested even before all 8 BILLION PEOPLE currently living were born. Wood is precious. You also don’t need solid wood for your fucking nightstand. So maybe you should buy a nightstand made out of the particleboard that is waste product from milling lumber for other uses, like construction. That’s called using everything, wasting nothing. It’s sustainable.
There is nothing wrong with IKEA furniture for most people’s everyday needs. And you are not going to get a 150-year all wood piece for the same price. LOL fuck no. When you are in your 40s and have made it big time you can go to a craft furniture maker and get a solid oak bedroom set. It will cost more than your first car did.
IKEA furniture does not fall apart in 3 years, either. I’m about to go get my pajamas out of the IKEA dresser I’ve had since 2001. It won’t last centuries like a real craftsman made wood dresser. But it’s not 3 year garbage either, and looks and works like the day I bought it, despite me using it daily for 22 years and moving it between at least 4 houses in that time.
IKEA furniture is good for what it is and very cheap. One of the reasons it’s cheap is that it is flat packed for efficient shipping. Assembly by the customer also saves cost. And seriously, if you can’t figure out the IKEA instructions, you must not be trying very hard.
OP has clearly never priced out solid wood furniture. A single mission-style sofa--by which I mean something made using Gustav Stickley's plans--will typically retail for well over $3000 US. ...Such as this version--from the original Stickley company--that has an MSRP of >$9000
Speak for yourself, I have multiple IKEA furniture that’s lasted me for 10 years. You just have to be careful and take care of your stuff.
The massive wood furniture that lasts two lifetimes is only as cheap as the IKEA counterpart if you do it all by yourself, in your own little woodshop, and only need to pay for glue, nails, hinges, and electricity. And still only of you Include felling and milling the trees on your own.
Some years ago, I wanted one wall of the living room done with a custom-made, wall filling book shelf. Estimated cost by the carpenter: 7000. I paid about 3000 for IKEA furniture and other materials and did two walls of shelves instead of just one, suspended the ceiling, ran a ton of wires and redid the whole living room electrical and communication infrastructure. Yes, all that for half the price quoted by the carpenter. Guess what? None of the furniture has broken down so far. And I don't expect it to.
My IKEA wardrobe survived 3 moves and 10 years so far and it's almost a good as new
In my experience, it's a choice between decent Ikea shelves that don't sag after a few years of use and super shitty Walmart furniture that falls apart in about 6 months.
Aside from the price of good quality wooden furniture, it's heavy as hell which is rough when you're a renter and moving every few years. There's also a lot of wooden furniture, old or new, is just as poorly constructed with peeling veneer and failing staples. Not everyone has the time, money, or space to fix that up.
And all that being said, Ikea isn't really that expensive for what it is. Their soft furnishings and decorative items seem overpriced, but their storage products (mostly what I get from them) are pretty decently priced. Yeah I've had my issues with missing parts and shitty customer service, but all in all my experience has been positive enough to keep going back.
I still want to get a couple really nice, high quality items, but I'm not going to break the bank every time I need a bookshelf.
I’ve got an Ikea couch I bought fifteen years ago that’s made a move across the US three times. I have two kids in their teens. The couch is still in good shape. I also have an entertainment center/TV stand that I bought from them 10 years ago from Ikea that’s in great shape.
The couch cost me $250, the TV stand cost me $50.
The myth of crappy Ikea furniture is overblown.
I can spend a good deal of time criticizing Ikea but on one thing I can't: their furniture is incredibly easy to copy and upgrade into a better version with minimal effort.
I took the time to break down, piece by piece, in a crazy exercise of reverse engineering, a love seat, to understand how they had designed and put together the thing.
After that, I sat to run the "numbers" and realised I could make it cheaper, sturdier and add storage room to it, with minimal modifications to the basic plan.
It was very interesting to discover.
As someone that worked in a cabinet shop for years, all mass produced furniture is going to be basically the same quality as what you buy from IKEA. It just feels cheap when you do it yourself.
It, like most things, wasn’t expensive. You used to have to pay a shit ton for anything that wasn’t custom made. Then Ikea came along and created massive competition and variety for the furniture market. Yes, now other brands are better, but that’s because they had to compete with Ikea
I have IKEA furniture that I bought 15 years ago and it’s going strong, having survived three movings and several changes inside the house. I actually don’t recall ever throwing out an Ikea furniture because it was broken.
Granted, I have one Malm drawer that has a broken piece because it didn’t stand against my wife’s mess. And I have a tv stand which the lower shelf is arched by the weight of the XBox and blu ray player.
You'll notice most responses in this thread are saying "5+ years ago, 10+ years ago, 15+ years ago" but if you check out IKEA prices and quality post-Romanian wood poaching bust, and post-Ukraine/Russia war, it's like night and day.
A couch in 2021 was $799 USD for a 3 piece sectional, now it's $1599 USD, and their entire "Solid Wood" search category has been replaced by "Wood + Particle Board + Veneer / Wood-like finish", as their solid wood category was removed. Now you have to discern every piece by eye and material quality.
Most of the furniture in my home is from IKEA, but imo it's gone dramatically downhill and will probably continue to do so.
Ikea is good at standardized parts and dimensions, you can often swap pieces around and do more stuff with modularity. Also they're pretty easy to fix when broken. A reinforcing bracket here, an extra screw there, attach it to the studs, there are options.
Not Ikea specific, but proper wood furniture only really makes sense if you're staying somewhere long term, have your own house, etc. If you have to move every couple of years for work, because rent is getting too expensive, etc etc, solid wood furniture is really inconvenient and expensive to transport.
Real wood furniture is heavy, hard to sell, and expensive to buy. It requires a guarantee of long term housing or a disregard for the long term nature of the furniture.
Ikea is(somewhat) cheap, functional, can be broken down and moved in a car, and when your lease is up, so is your particleboard coffee table.
In the early 90s I bought a second hand IKEA twin bed. It has survived a transatlantic move and is still around.
Ever heard of the IKEA effect ?
The problem is any of the stuff like shelving or say a load bearing surface like a desk. Those flat surfaces are almost always MDF or whatever cheap engineered wood products IKEA uses. The furniture looks nice initially, especially for the price, but the horizontal surfaces always sag after 2-3 years even under low weight. I have a dresser, a desk, and shelving that all developed this problem and some of the shelves barely have anything on them.
I've only been to an IKEA once, and I've never bought their furniture, but my best guess is the meatballs.
On a semi-related note, if you haven't read the book Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix, you really should.
I like to ask anyone when they say they went to IKEA "did you have to build your own exit to leave?", it makes me chuckle
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Their big bags are really good for hauling stuff
I bought an IKEA desk that caved in when I attached my monitor mount to it. That said, the legs were good enough and made of metal so I just bought a piece of timber to be the desk top and attached the IKEA legs
How did they do it??
Oh that's simple. Ikea founder sold his soul to the devil. He didn't included the assembly manual though and thus Ikea still functions.
