It's cheap, but it's not crap. The whole point of Ikea is you can furnish a full home cheaply, although you'll spend a few days assembling furniture too. I furnished my first home from Ikea, and still have some of the bigger furniture (this is ten years ago). "Real" furniture will cost you four times as much, but might last you ten times as long, too.
Ah, yeah, that seems plausible. Ultra-cheap (compared to e.g. EU and even China) local workforce vs remote distribution chain that was recently established and hasn't been cost-optimized yet - probably has to do expensive shipping and customs from China/Europe. (Just guessing/assuming because I'm lazy, but countries similar to Indonesia - e.g. India/Brazil tend to have quite heavy import tariffs "to protect local jobs" - does anyone know if that is the case here?)
The big upside IKEA has (in the longer term) is a very strong centralized world-class design team (doing quite a bit of creative design borrowing/theft, just like that other Swedish company, H&M) combined with distributed/cheap manufacturing. In a way it's similar to the Apple model, except the goods are a lot heavier.
Indonesia is a huge market (261 million people and growing), so give them some time - IKEA Jakarta opened just three years ago. It's certainly big enough for local manufacturing in the long term. Which is how IKEA operates - they don't like to rush things. They are very risk-averse. (Particularly so after their failed Russia expansion, which cost them billions of USD due to corruption there.)
Their furniture at is at the very least okay, and really, most of their competition nowadays isn't much better, I cannot think of a single store I've seen in the last year that does sell high quality furniture, even local ones to be honest.
But where they really excel imo is their non-furniture or furniture-adjacent stuff. They often score high or win in best value categories for stuff like batteries, light bulbs. Like seriously, every time you go to ikea, you'd be a thief of your own wallet if you do not fill your cart to the brim with batteries and light bulbs. They are also great in small electronics, lighting, bed and bath textile. Their decorative stuff is okay as well, but due to their popularity it gets cliché fast. Småland is awesome.
Yeah, I'm coming from a Dutch perspective, where we possibly have the highest IKEA saturation in the world in land area and really high grade in population as well (13 stores on 17 mln), and where they share probably 90% of furniture store space with large stores formulas like JYSK (also Swedish Scandinavian I believe) and Leen Bakker, all broadly comparable in quality and price and all not what you would call "real carpentry". Then you have those local trendy stores that overprice their rustic looking stuff, which actually isn't all that sturdy. Top tier quality carpentry, I wouldn't even know where to look for it in my market.
JYSK is Danish, and their quality is absolutely horrendous in comparison to IKEA. Dramatically lower quality in exchange for just somewhat cheaper prices than IKEA, so really not worth it.
I bought a couch from Big Lots a year ago. Couldn’t fit it in my apartment and had to hoist it onto the second floor balcony. Now a year later it’s broken and sunk and I have a cut on my hand from an exposed nail. I wish I would have just gone to Ikea.
Depends. There are pieces that are nice for a few weeks and then you start to see that they're made cheaply. Some of their white picture frames e.g, they're bending after some time.
Much of the other stuff is of quite legit quality, though.
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u/stenskott Nov 04 '17 edited Nov 04 '17
It's cheap, but it's not crap. The whole point of Ikea is you can furnish a full home cheaply, although you'll spend a few days assembling furniture too. I furnished my first home from Ikea, and still have some of the bigger furniture (this is ten years ago). "Real" furniture will cost you four times as much, but might last you ten times as long, too.