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What a sad analogy. IKEA furniture is mostly cheap particle board crap and it's a shame that we as a humanity have cheapened our lives to the point where IKEA i

by samiv 1mo ago

What a sad analogy. IKEA furniture is mostly cheap particle board crap and it's a shame that we as a humanity have cheapened our lives to the point where IKEA is some kind of standard (and the only thing) most people can afford. Back in the day furniture was artisanal and hand made yet people were able to afford and have it. Isn't that in fact weird, supposedly our societies are richer than ever before but most people can't afford artisanal goods that our forefathers would be able to afford even though they were supposedly so much poorer. (Hint, distribution of wealth matters a lot)

xyzsparetimexyz 1mo ago
There's probably also a factor of less artisanal goods being made but yes, I agree
- bluGill 1mo ago
  I think that is false, there is more artisanal furniture today. In the past people had less furniture and most of it was junk. With power tools people can afford more good furniture, even though it is lost among all the junk. Don't forget that good furniture lasts longer than junk and what the past made is kept for decades. Also with the much larger population today, a small percentage of craftsmen still dwarfs the output of the past.
eberkund 1mo ago
It's not weird, it's because we define wealth in terms of buying IKEA furniture that we are considered much wealthier than the past. If the affordability of handmade goods or services were the measure of wealth, then perhaps we are much poorer today. I can see how each viewpoint exhibits some contradicting insights.
- alberto467 1mo ago
  The industrial goods are what made us all richer and allowed us to specialize even more.
Rebuff5007 1mo ago
What a sad retelling of reality. A large amount of ikea furniture is not cheap particle board crap. they have a range of materials for all of their products, and even some of the medium end products look nice and hold well. Additionally, many middle-class families have "back in the day" stories where their houses were filled with bare essentials for which i'm sure an ikea bed frame would feel like an upgrade. I think the real IKEA problem is global homogeneity (there seems to be a MALM dresser whatever home i'm in around the world), but that doesnt mean we are collectively living with a low standard.
- blub 1mo ago
  Names and links or they don’t exist :) Even their absolute high-end stuff is at best particle board with veneer. And you can bet the back will still be that thin 3mm fiberboard, no matter how high-end they look. Unfortunately, top models nowadays have more and more hollow panels. Seems to me that quality’s going down and they’re trying to save money with the materials they offer. But they can still be a good enough compromise, as I found out when looking for e.g. a TV sideboard.
  - Rebuff5007 1mo ago
    How lazy do you have to be... within seconds of hitting ikea.com: https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/skogsta-table-acacia-black-00452643 https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/skogsta-table-acacia-black-0045... https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/hemnes-chest-of-6-drawers-white-stain-60239273 https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/hemnes-chest-of-6-drawers-white... The wood types are clearly labeled, so its not something they are trying to hide. And i'm not sure why hollow panels in itself are necessarily a bad thing...cutting down on material without hurting design or functionality has plenty of benefits (environmental, weight, cost).
    - blub 1mo ago
      For chests of drawers and bookcases they have one configurable wood product. All the storage solutions for the living room are tiny and almost all of them are made of unstained pine. For wardrobes they have two products, one of which is open and looks bad and the other’s tiny. There are no wood equivalents to Pax, Platsa or Besta, the Ikea workhorses with a modern design. And even if they existed, I don’t think people would rush to buy them. Solid wood’s not what Ikea’s known for and would cost too much for their target market. I’m not saying they’re bad - I own several of their products, and while I’m overall pleased with them, I don’t love them. The compromises and cost-cutting design choices are always there if you know what to look for. None of my Ikea furniture brings me joy or makes me want to touch it. It’s functional and looks decent to good. Hollow panels are too light, not robust enough and essentially unrepairable. One could buy some Ikea pieces and cut them / adapt them in irder to upgrade them. These panels make that impossible.
DanielHB 1mo ago
I disagree with this sentiment, IKEA furniture is much more sustainable than artisanal furniture. Most of the "back in the day" furniture came from tearing down virgin woods. Sorting + shredding-recycling + making new "cheap particle board crap" furniture takes a lot of energy, but not a lot of non-renewable resources. With increased electrification this problem is being drastically reduced and the wood is sourced from re-grown tree farms (which also have their environment problems, but it is nowhere near as bad) I am from Brazil and before the recent soy-growing deforestation of the amazon the #1 cause of deforestation was furniture-making. My parents have a really old dinner table made from high grade wood, is it is a pain in the ass to move and it has a ton of scuffs we can't be bothered to fix. Once my parents move we will probably throw it away. It lasted 40 years (with a big varnish rework around 25 years in) but the trees used to make it will never come back, my ikea table has been with us for around 8 years and still works fine. Particle board tech has come a long way and it is much better than it used to be, IKEA particle board is consistently "okay" to "great", but other manufacturers it is not guaranteed. The only thing it lacks (by design) is the weight, particle board will be much lighter than "normal wood" furniture, which is both good and bad depending on the situation (some types of furniture you want to be heavy).
- mattmanser 1mo ago
  This seems delusional to me, being older and more experienced with how long IKEA stuff actually lasts. 8 years is long for IKEA furniture, usually something has irreplaceablely broken by then. IKEA also refuse to sell you spare parts. Give me real furniture anyday.
  - LtWorf 1mo ago
    Quite a long comment to write that you've never once seen ikea furniture.
    - DanielHB 1mo ago
      I live in Sweden now, so yes I have seen some IKEA furniture around.
vjvjvjvjghv 1mo ago
Back in the day artisans took care of horses and new have cheapened ourselves to use stinky cars. Back in the day we built computers with relays by hand, now we have cheapened ourselves to use weird semiconductors and use inefficient python code instead of highly optimized hand crafted assembly. Maybe we should go back to hunting and gathering?
- sashank_1509 1mo ago
  Typical sentiment I see that completely lacks any nuance. For one car vs IKEA are two completely different beasts entirely. A car opened up new avenues that a human could never do before its invention. This itself makes it a far more worthy invention than most. IKEA cheapened stuff and gave low quality cookie cutter furniture to everyone. Was this really a great thing, that propelled humanity forward? It’s also not like IKEA brought down the price to dirt cheap, it’s just like half or one third the price. What great thing will society lose if we ban IKEA tomorrow. People will spend a bit more on furniture, but they will have artisanal quality furniture and more artisans in society. That’s a trade I’d take any day.
  - vjvjvjvjghv 1mo ago
    IKEA allowed people to afford decent quality furniture who otherwise couldn’t afford it. That’s a huge benefit in my view. Your “spend a bit more” is actually a huge amount for artisanal quality furniture. That’s how commodization has always worked. Something is suddenly available for the masses with maybe some loss of quality. Look at Excel. A lot of elitists look down on people doing complex stuff with it but in reality it has enabled many people to do stuff they would otherwise have to pay a ton of money for. Back to furniture. You are free to buy artisanal furniture but for a lot of people worldwide it would be a huge loss if Ikea didn’t exist.
    - theshrike79 1mo ago
      Not just decent quality, decently looking furniture. If you look at any architectural magazine, you can in most cases spot a few IKEA pieces in there if you know how to look. Because they look "good" - or at least mostly neutral. Cheap furniture used to _look_ cheap before IKEA.
LtWorf 1mo ago
Ikea sells quality stuff as well. Also it's good that we can now afford furniture where our ancestors would have a couple of chairs and a half broken table passed down for generations. Personally I'm quite happy that dropping a plate on the ground isn't a terrible event.
ben_w 1mo ago
> What a sad analogy. IKEA furniture is mostly cheap particle board crap The first time I saw GenAI compared to IKEA, it was for this reason, ~"particle board is fine for furniture, but you really don't want it to be a load-bearing part of your house". > Isn't that in fact weird, supposedly our societies are richer than ever before but most people can't afford artisanal goods that our forefathers would be able to afford even though they were supposedly so much poorer. Shakespeare's will gave to his wife his "second best bed"; if a relative of yours wrote in their will that you'd get a fancy antique bed, would you want it?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare's_will https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare's_will > (Hint, distribution of wealth matters a lot) This was true in the past, too. The historical artefacts we mostly see are the exceptions that survived, not what average people owned. The tightly-packed wooden homes of London before the Great Fire just aren't there any more, and even fancy places in the same category as now-iconic British country houses were not immune, "around 4,000 were demolished between 1875 and 1975" according to https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/inspire-me/the-fall-and-rise-of-the-english-country-house/ https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/inspire-me/the-fal...
Alien1Being 1mo ago
But.. Most enterprise software written by your colleagues is mostly cheap particle board crap. At least IKEA furniture is usually reliable and does not fail catastrophicaly unlike the crappy bug ridden enterprise software we all have deal with...Jira, SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, etc... Mature AI will be better than the average mediocrity that calls himself a software developer.
- 8note 1mo ago
  the "code isnt the hard part" says that the quality of the code might be higher, but itll be just as buggy because the hard part was always about communicating the right thing to build code written by ai that the end user cant complain about or communicate their complaints about will be just as bad as hand crafted artisan code that the end user cant communicate complaints about or influence
ozim 1mo ago
Survivorship bias, you see only old tables or chairs that lasted, you don't see all the crap that didn't make it to present times. False dichotomy "if it is not IKEA it is 'artisanal' great quality" — well — no our forefathers would be able to afford whatever quality had local woodworking shop and imagine that a lot of places didn't have best of te best... So IKEA made average quality much better.
al_borland 1mo ago
Expectations of society have changed. This cannot be discounted. That old furniture was also expensive. A family would save up and buy a piece, use it their whole life, and often pass it on to children or other family members. These days, with IKEA, Wayfair, etc, people throw out and get all new furniture every time they move, or even just to refresh a space. They do this because the furniture is cheap. If they saved up for a year to buy a kitchen table, it would be used for a long time and not get discarded and replaced along with fashion trends in home decor. The high quality stuff is still out there, it’s just that most people don’t want to pay for it, as we don’t see furniture as an investment anymore. People seem to have no problem paying $1,000 for a phone that they’ll replace in 2-3 years, yet they won’t spend $4,000 on a kitchen table that will be used 3+ times per day by the whole family for 50 years.
- HappMacDonald 29d ago
  Genuine question: but are there still people eating meals in a home dining room in the 2020s? Or is this just inertia of expectation from the 20th century from folk who expect "well that's just what you do" even though their dining room tables are presently covered in unrelated "temporarily put there" items?
eudamoniac 1mo ago
> Back in the day furniture was artisanal and hand made yet people were able to afford and have it. I'm pretty sure this is not correct. "Back in the day" artisanal solid wood furniture was so expensive that you would buy it once and keep it your entire life and then your children would use it after you die for their entire life. It was not even the same ballpark of price.
- HappMacDonald 29d ago
  But it may have been after amortization. The conceit is similar to "ordinary plates vs paper plates". Nobody is arguing that a single ordinary plate is "cheaper" than as single paper plate, but one can still argue about how TCO of a set of ordinary plates vs constantly buying a stream of new paper ones just to throw them away after each use.
  - eudamoniac 27d ago
    Ikea furniture doesn't just break, usually. You can have the same Ikea furniture for decades. Even if it did though, you can also still buy the solid wood Amish furniture for a reasonable price if you're intending to keep it your entire life. A big Amish couch is ~$5k on the high end. A big Ikea couch is $1-2k, which people can and do buy multiple times. It's just that people expect that they should be able to replace their furniture every five years on whims, and it also be high quality, and it also be cheap. That's their problem.

by samiv 1mo ago

xyzsparetimexyz 1mo ago

There's probably also a factor of less artisanal goods being made but yes, I agree

bluGill 1mo ago
I think that is false, there is more artisanal furniture today. In the past people had less furniture and most of it was junk. With power tools people can afford more good furniture, even though it is lost among all the junk. Don't forget that good furniture lasts longer than junk and what the past made is kept for decades. Also with the much larger population today, a small percentage of craftsmen still dwarfs the output of the past.

eberkund 1mo ago

It's not weird, it's because we define wealth in terms of buying IKEA furniture that we are considered much wealthier than the past. If the affordability of handmade goods or services were the measure of wealth, then perhaps we are much poorer today. I can see how each viewpoint exhibits some contradicting insights.

alberto467 1mo ago
The industrial goods are what made us all richer and allowed us to specialize even more.

Rebuff5007 1mo ago

What a sad retelling of reality. A large amount of ikea furniture is not cheap particle board crap. they have a range of materials for all of their products, and even some of the medium end products look nice and hold well. Additionally, many middle-class families have "back in the day" stories where their houses were filled with bare essentials for which i'm sure an ikea bed frame would feel like an upgrade. I think the real IKEA problem is global homogeneity (there seems to be a MALM dresser whatever home i'm in around the world), but that doesnt mean we are collectively living with a low standard.

blub 1mo ago
Names and links or they don’t exist :) Even their absolute high-end stuff is at best particle board with veneer. And you can bet the back will still be that thin 3mm fiberboard, no matter how high-end they look. Unfortunately, top models nowadays have more and more hollow panels. Seems to me that quality’s going down and they’re trying to save money with the materials they offer. But they can still be a good enough compromise, as I found out when looking for e.g. a TV sideboard.
- Rebuff5007 1mo ago
  How lazy do you have to be... within seconds of hitting ikea.com: https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/skogsta-table-acacia-black-00452643 https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/skogsta-table-acacia-black-0045... https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/hemnes-chest-of-6-drawers-white-stain-60239273 https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/hemnes-chest-of-6-drawers-white... The wood types are clearly labeled, so its not something they are trying to hide. And i'm not sure why hollow panels in itself are necessarily a bad thing...cutting down on material without hurting design or functionality has plenty of benefits (environmental, weight, cost).
  - blub 1mo ago
    For chests of drawers and bookcases they have one configurable wood product. All the storage solutions for the living room are tiny and almost all of them are made of unstained pine. For wardrobes they have two products, one of which is open and looks bad and the other’s tiny. There are no wood equivalents to Pax, Platsa or Besta, the Ikea workhorses with a modern design. And even if they existed, I don’t think people would rush to buy them. Solid wood’s not what Ikea’s known for and would cost too much for their target market. I’m not saying they’re bad - I own several of their products, and while I’m overall pleased with them, I don’t love them. The compromises and cost-cutting design choices are always there if you know what to look for. None of my Ikea furniture brings me joy or makes me want to touch it. It’s functional and looks decent to good. Hollow panels are too light, not robust enough and essentially unrepairable. One could buy some Ikea pieces and cut them / adapt them in irder to upgrade them. These panels make that impossible.

DanielHB 1mo ago

I disagree with this sentiment, IKEA furniture is much more sustainable than artisanal furniture. Most of the "back in the day" furniture came from tearing down virgin woods. Sorting + shredding-recycling + making new "cheap particle board crap" furniture takes a lot of energy, but not a lot of non-renewable resources. With increased electrification this problem is being drastically reduced and the wood is sourced from re-grown tree farms (which also have their environment problems, but it is nowhere near as bad) I am from Brazil and before the recent soy-growing deforestation of the amazon the #1 cause of deforestation was furniture-making. My parents have a really old dinner table made from high grade wood, is it is a pain in the ass to move and it has a ton of scuffs we can't be bothered to fix. Once my parents move we will probably throw it away. It lasted 40 years (with a big varnish rework around 25 years in) but the trees used to make it will never come back, my ikea table has been with us for around 8 years and still works fine. Particle board tech has come a long way and it is much better than it used to be, IKEA particle board is consistently "okay" to "great", but other manufacturers it is not guaranteed. The only thing it lacks (by design) is the weight, particle board will be much lighter than "normal wood" furniture, which is both good and bad depending on the situation (some types of furniture you want to be heavy).

mattmanser 1mo ago
This seems delusional to me, being older and more experienced with how long IKEA stuff actually lasts. 8 years is long for IKEA furniture, usually something has irreplaceablely broken by then. IKEA also refuse to sell you spare parts. Give me real furniture anyday.
- LtWorf 1mo ago
  Quite a long comment to write that you've never once seen ikea furniture.
  - DanielHB 1mo ago
    I live in Sweden now, so yes I have seen some IKEA furniture around.

vjvjvjvjghv 1mo ago

Back in the day artisans took care of horses and new have cheapened ourselves to use stinky cars. Back in the day we built computers with relays by hand, now we have cheapened ourselves to use weird semiconductors and use inefficient python code instead of highly optimized hand crafted assembly. Maybe we should go back to hunting and gathering?

sashank_1509 1mo ago
Typical sentiment I see that completely lacks any nuance. For one car vs IKEA are two completely different beasts entirely. A car opened up new avenues that a human could never do before its invention. This itself makes it a far more worthy invention than most. IKEA cheapened stuff and gave low quality cookie cutter furniture to everyone. Was this really a great thing, that propelled humanity forward? It’s also not like IKEA brought down the price to dirt cheap, it’s just like half or one third the price. What great thing will society lose if we ban IKEA tomorrow. People will spend a bit more on furniture, but they will have artisanal quality furniture and more artisans in society. That’s a trade I’d take any day.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1mo ago
  IKEA allowed people to afford decent quality furniture who otherwise couldn’t afford it. That’s a huge benefit in my view. Your “spend a bit more” is actually a huge amount for artisanal quality furniture. That’s how commodization has always worked. Something is suddenly available for the masses with maybe some loss of quality. Look at Excel. A lot of elitists look down on people doing complex stuff with it but in reality it has enabled many people to do stuff they would otherwise have to pay a ton of money for. Back to furniture. You are free to buy artisanal furniture but for a lot of people worldwide it would be a huge loss if Ikea didn’t exist.
  - theshrike79 1mo ago
    Not just decent quality, decently looking furniture. If you look at any architectural magazine, you can in most cases spot a few IKEA pieces in there if you know how to look. Because they look "good" - or at least mostly neutral. Cheap furniture used to _look_ cheap before IKEA.

LtWorf 1mo ago

Ikea sells quality stuff as well. Also it's good that we can now afford furniture where our ancestors would have a couple of chairs and a half broken table passed down for generations. Personally I'm quite happy that dropping a plate on the ground isn't a terrible event.

ben_w 1mo ago

> What a sad analogy. IKEA furniture is mostly cheap particle board crap The first time I saw GenAI compared to IKEA, it was for this reason, ~"particle board is fine for furniture, but you really don't want it to be a load-bearing part of your house". > Isn't that in fact weird, supposedly our societies are richer than ever before but most people can't afford artisanal goods that our forefathers would be able to afford even though they were supposedly so much poorer. Shakespeare's will gave to his wife his "second best bed"; if a relative of yours wrote in their will that you'd get a fancy antique bed, would you want it?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare's_will https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare's_will > (Hint, distribution of wealth matters a lot) This was true in the past, too. The historical artefacts we mostly see are the exceptions that survived, not what average people owned. The tightly-packed wooden homes of London before the Great Fire just aren't there any more, and even fancy places in the same category as now-iconic British country houses were not immune, "around 4,000 were demolished between 1875 and 1975" according to https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/inspire-me/the-fall-and-rise-of-the-english-country-house/ https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/inspire-me/the-fal...

Alien1Being 1mo ago

But.. Most enterprise software written by your colleagues is mostly cheap particle board crap. At least IKEA furniture is usually reliable and does not fail catastrophicaly unlike the crappy bug ridden enterprise software we all have deal with...Jira, SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, etc... Mature AI will be better than the average mediocrity that calls himself a software developer.

8note 1mo ago
the "code isnt the hard part" says that the quality of the code might be higher, but itll be just as buggy because the hard part was always about communicating the right thing to build code written by ai that the end user cant complain about or communicate their complaints about will be just as bad as hand crafted artisan code that the end user cant communicate complaints about or influence

ozim 1mo ago

Survivorship bias, you see only old tables or chairs that lasted, you don't see all the crap that didn't make it to present times. False dichotomy "if it is not IKEA it is 'artisanal' great quality" — well — no our forefathers would be able to afford whatever quality had local woodworking shop and imagine that a lot of places didn't have best of te best... So IKEA made average quality much better.

al_borland 1mo ago

Expectations of society have changed. This cannot be discounted. That old furniture was also expensive. A family would save up and buy a piece, use it their whole life, and often pass it on to children or other family members. These days, with IKEA, Wayfair, etc, people throw out and get all new furniture every time they move, or even just to refresh a space. They do this because the furniture is cheap. If they saved up for a year to buy a kitchen table, it would be used for a long time and not get discarded and replaced along with fashion trends in home decor. The high quality stuff is still out there, it’s just that most people don’t want to pay for it, as we don’t see furniture as an investment anymore. People seem to have no problem paying $1,000 for a phone that they’ll replace in 2-3 years, yet they won’t spend $4,000 on a kitchen table that will be used 3+ times per day by the whole family for 50 years.

HappMacDonald 29d ago
Genuine question: but are there still people eating meals in a home dining room in the 2020s? Or is this just inertia of expectation from the 20th century from folk who expect "well that's just what you do" even though their dining room tables are presently covered in unrelated "temporarily put there" items?

eudamoniac 1mo ago

> Back in the day furniture was artisanal and hand made yet people were able to afford and have it. I'm pretty sure this is not correct. "Back in the day" artisanal solid wood furniture was so expensive that you would buy it once and keep it your entire life and then your children would use it after you die for their entire life. It was not even the same ballpark of price.

HappMacDonald 29d ago
But it may have been after amortization. The conceit is similar to "ordinary plates vs paper plates". Nobody is arguing that a single ordinary plate is "cheaper" than as single paper plate, but one can still argue about how TCO of a set of ordinary plates vs constantly buying a stream of new paper ones just to throw them away after each use.
- eudamoniac 27d ago
  Ikea furniture doesn't just break, usually. You can have the same Ikea furniture for decades. Even if it did though, you can also still buy the solid wood Amish furniture for a reasonable price if you're intending to keep it your entire life. A big Amish couch is ~$5k on the high end. A big Ikea couch is $1-2k, which people can and do buy multiple times. It's just that people expect that they should be able to replace their furniture every five years on whims, and it also be high quality, and it also be cheap. That's their problem.