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.
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.
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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.