That store layout is a social psych experiment, no?
Yes, it tests the hypothesis that millions of people will spend a ton of money in such an environment. Preliminary results look promising. Can't stand it myself.
I have been so many times that I have the layout memorized and can take the shortcuts as needed. it used to be one of the only air-conditioned places I could take my children to play; they would pretend we lived in the different rooms. when crowded it is a preview of hell, however.
It's more that it's the instantiation of the results of lots of social psych experiments. It's very, very carefully designed to make people spend more money than they meant to.
I'm okay with sneering about Chili's, but Ikea has nice, well-designed furniture that even I am able to build successfully (though it is indeed a huge pain in the ass to do so).
Ikea also has a reputation for fairness to workers, though the L.A. Times suggests that this doesn't apply to U.S. workers.
I think the LAT story makes a stronger case against the U.S. than against Ikea.
Some of it's good, some of it's irritatingly flimsy and annoying. But given the number of cheap bookshelves I've bought there, I shouldn't complain.
I'm always surprised that that kind of design/layout strategy works -- I hate stores with that sort of "You can't find your way out until you've walked past everything" layout so much that I flee as fast as I can once I've found what I came for, and avoid going back until I really have to. I'd think it would be counterproductive for sales, but I'm clearly wrong.
Isn't Cen/tral Mar/ket basically laid out along the same philosophy, heebie?
I like very specific things there, so I still go even after the great Ikea purge of '08 in which I decided I would not have furniture made of particle board/requiring an allen wrench anymore (except ok the bookcase which is exactly what I need.) But so I wander the maze of particle board and umlauts for a while thinking "I NEED ONE OF EVERYTHING" because it's cheap and some of it is nicely designed and then there's this certain point where I think "IT'S A TRAP! MUST GET OUT!"
I secretly love Ikea lunch though. I bet if I took the Ikea ferry I could get Ikea lunch and be back in like an hour-ish.
Where else can you get reasonably priced lingonberries, after all.
I don't like the particleboard stuff, but you can also get some things made of real wood. Cheap, soft wood, but real wood nevertheless. And I adore bent plywood. The edges look so cool!
the "higher" end ikea stuff is often perfectly fine, as blume says. my friend's house has got plenty of strategically deployed ikea furniture.
We have an Ikea sofa purchased back when we absolutely had to buy a new sofa and were in the process if toilet training the little one. Washable slipcovers, FTW.
There was an article about IKEA in the New Yorker a few weeks ago. It was kind of weird. There's almost a ult in the home town.
I can't link to it, because I don't have my subscriber information and haven't signed up for online access yet. It's worth reading.
On Saturday mornings they serve free reakfast.
Do they make the breakfast from missing initial letters?
If everything in Ikea was just given a standard English name as pronounced by ScoobyDoo, that would be great.
One of my favorite deatils in that NYer article is that Ikea keeps a list of names not to use for their products because they sound like swear words in non-Swedish languages. There were a couple of funny examples.
7: I wander the maze of particle board and umlauts
Line from a tragically unrecorded Johnny Cash song.
I'm okay with sneering about Chili's, but Ikea has nice, well-designed furniture that even I am able to build successfully (though it is indeed a huge pain in the ass to do so).
We're not really sneering at the furniture (although I cringe at how well I'm categorized) so much as the store layout and cattle mentality.
Line from a tragically unrecorded Johnny Cash song.
A Boy Named Agnetha?
Umlaut is probably going to end up rhyming with sauerkraut despite my efforts to make it rhyme with anything else.
I can't see how to fit it into a sentence, but "room, flout".
A Boy Named Agnetha?
I'm seeing some sort of sentimental country number about how the guy started to realise his Swedish wife was trying to tell him something by buying IKEA household furniture with names that meant depressing things in Swedish. A dinner table called "REGRET" and a bathroom cabinet called "ANOMIE", etc. Title of song: "Flatpack Bed Called Despair".
21: Or the day at the pit when someone forgot the broad swords. Instead, we had a broom bout.
I liked the organic dark beer brewed with naturally occurring fungal psychedelics.
23: or when those crazy mountain climbers tried to make the everest ascent safe by applying cwm grout.
I'm going to assume 25 was to nothing, Lopez, and that comments are about to get a lot more interesting.
But I hate it when big scary guys lurk in alleyways and then suddenly loom out.
We have a Billy bookcase, just like everyone else. I've noticed that IKEA won't deliver, but they will give (rent?) forecourt space to an independent delivery company. That's surely ideological: it must be costing them more (in parking spaces, if nothing else) than they save.
I made the mistake of eating at Chili's while changing planes in Chicago. I ordered a 'queso dip'. Basically, a huge block of Velveeta, melted down, and with a few bits of ground beef floating in it. And a mound of very salty corn chips to go with. I ate about 15% of this, then felt very unwell. Some odd psychosomatic thing: knowing that you'd been served appallingly wrong food.
26, 28: Great, now put those in couplets with lines that end in umlaut.
Are you asking what a Billy bookcase is? It's IKEA's big plain wood bookcase -- if someone has basic looking IKEA bookshelves, they're probably Billys.
The "A" was italicized in 31, no?
Ah, that makes sense. The singular looked a little odd to me too -- I think we have seven or so.
Next you all are going to tell me that everyone has those little stackable same-sized white bowls -- I forget what they're called -- instead of small unique handmade bowls.
30: That the mountaineer's gracious last name had an umlaut / was to him sub-crevasse of less use than some cwm grout.
Ah, you young people who haven't inherited your parents' furniture yet!
Heh.
Mississippi's proposed constitutional amendment to declare a fertilized egg a person -- the so-called Personhood Amendment -- is some thing, isn't it? I do not like it, no I don't.
||
These Star-Trek-themed PSAs for the Social Security Administration featuring George Takei and Patty Duke (??!) are, um, unusual.
|>
You do not like personhood/eggs and sperm?
I do not like them, ParSim-I-On
Next you all are going to tell me that everyone has those little stackable same-sized white bowls
I'm a fan of my Corelle dishes -- nearly indestructible (I did chip a plate once, but that required significant force).
I do have a variety of handmade pottery mugs, many of them from the farmers market.
Ah, you young people who haven't inherited your parents' furniture yet!
As a matter of fact, my mom hired a starving artist to drive a UHaul across the country just last week.
Ah, crud. We always miss out.
Am I the only person who thinks that Ikea is shitty, low-quality furniture? It's like the McDonald's of furniture.
It totally depends model by model. Some of their stuff is cardboard and glue held together with umlauts, and it sucks, other stuff is cheaply made but solid enough. The Billy bookshelves, e.g., aren't glamorous or anything, and after a decade or so the shelves sag a little in the middle, but they work great and look inoffensive for the price.
I've called it the Old Navy of furniture, actually. Everything seems like it ought to be great, but something is inevitably weird or wonky. Occasionally the item is totally fine.
And if you're not prepared to spend a lot of time haunting second-hand places for good solid old stuff, it's hard to buy furniture. You can get flimsy, shitty furniture for five times the price of the IKEA equivalent if you're not very careful; price is even less a guarantee of quality than it is in lots of other areas.
That is true. It is a quick route to stuff that is basically cheap and fine.
But so is McDonald's. Except double the cheap and half the fine.
My view is that it's not great for major centerpiece items that you want to be a big deal in your home (this assumes that you plan on being in your home for a while) -- dining room tables, living room couches, etc. But it's great for inoffensively filling in side needs, like a little kitchen table, an extra clothes dresser, a bookshelf that's not the key focus of a room. Some of the kitchen stuff is fine, some is terrible. The lowest-range Ikea stuff is noticeably much worse than the higher range stuff.
It's also incredibly great for furnishing a kids room or an apartment you know you'll be leaving in a few years. Just incredibly awesome for that.
I've furnished my apartment almost entirely from Ikea stuff. I was surprised that there was just enough of each type of item I was looking for that I wanted to buy it, as 90% of the stuff I saw there was not appealing. I did not get any couches or chairs and the tables I have are for desk purposes.
I don't actually like my bookcase, but it was cheaper than the alternatives I looked at and I don't think it's going with me when I move.
29.1: There are two good reasons Ikea doesn't do this. The first is that it insulates them somewhat from operational difficulties with running a delivery service. This is the same reason they won't directly assemble your furniture or install your kitchen cabinets. Those are different kinds of businesses. Complaints about the quality/timing of the delivery service would inevitably contaminate your impression of the stores and products.
The second reason is to fight the kind of growth-at-any-cost mission creep suffered by so many other large corporations that used to be very good at one thing, and are now just generally mediocre, or out of business.
They really ought to license the Jonathan Coulton song.
Though I am by no means an Ikea partisan. I am very happy with my mid-century-modern nighttables, 1930s dressers, and humongous painted, carved teak bookcases, all bought used.
I never even went through a "new Ikea" phase; I went almost directly from buying pre-owned Ikea furniture on Craigslist to buying the good stuff.
Why do I always want to spell it iKea?
46: Maybe you just suck at assembling it.
Because you're confusing it with the Apple-branded New Zealand parrot?
Don't they spell it IKEA, typically?
If ikeA makes something that looks weird, it probably won't work. E.g. the footstool that looks like a bent pipe with a cushion around one end, or the bookshelves with gaps in the middle. But if they make something that looks boring, it should work.
I did not know this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_placement
In a twist on traditional product placement, Hewlett-Packard computers now appear exclusively as part of photo layouts in the IKEA catalog in addition to placing plastic models of its computers in IKEA stores, having taken over Apple's position in the Swedish furniture retailer's promotional materials several years ago.
I didn't realize delivery at Ikea was done by a contractor - it's not branded any differently, I thought of it as "you turn right after checkout and there's the delivery area." I knew the individual trucks were contractors, but that's presumably par for the course.
If ikeA makes something that looks weird, it probably won't work.
Second. Their tube-based sugar jar is shit.
Also with used furniture, unless you're getting the oh-so-trendy (and expensive) modern stuff, it can be hard to find things that are small enough for urban apartment rooms. Massive wooden things just don't fit well.
Third. Their sugar-based shit jar is tubular.
it can be hard to find things that are small enough for urban apartment rooms.
Texas has a huge glut of what I call Dustbowl Antiques, which are too drab/ugly/country to quite be Mad Men-esque. Anyway, the stuff tends to be smaller.
The really big used stuff is from the past 30 years, I think.
58: Remember, it's pronounced "EE-kay-ah"
Yeah, I think that's right-- the wooden furniture equivalent of overstuffed couches.
66: Mid-century stuff honestly doesn't cost that much more than high-end Ikea if you put a little time into finding it. This was my whole thing when I bought my place. I'm really not totally dissing Ikea--I like their little slipper chairs, for one, but I like my vintage stuff a lot more. And it's all scaled to my quite unpalatial digs.
I guess I don't know where to look, then? Where do you get mid-century stuff that doesn't have massively inflated prices?
66: Mid-century stuff honestly doesn't cost that much more than high-end Ikea if you put a little time into finding it.
I value my time more than my aesthetics (regarding furniture purchases). Also my way of seconding 73.
I bet there are forums. Are there forums full of mid-century modernism nerds with a hilarious excess of Eames chairs selling them for reasonable prices to other nerds? I just bet there are.
75: Why do these furniture nerds keep selling me chairs?
If you know what you're looking for, you can probably find stuff on eBay.
The convenience advantage of Ikea over similarly-priced used stuff is huge if you don't have a car. Who wants to bus/bike through multiple residential areas before finding the right thing, and then arrange for a friend or service to help get it home?
All I know is that I resent having to go there in order to get something delivered.
Just the one Billy. We do have more books than will fit into it, but we make do with non-IKEA second hand shelves and the floor. M really hates using the floor for books, so if I get myself sorted out, there'll be some Vitsoe shelves before too long. But after reading the latest New Yorker, with the article telling how books only burden your descendents, mask ignorance and impress noone, I may never buy a book again.
78: to shop at IKEA, we would typically rent a Zipcar (van), crawl around the North Circular for an hour, trudge through the fucking Skinner box showroom, find the item in the warehouse, cart it, pay, load up, crawl back southwards. It hardly helps to have the option of home delivery only once you're made it as far as the car park: the only step saved in the above is loading the van.
If you know what you're looking for, you can probably find stuff on eBay.
I would have thought eBay would be one of the more expensive options, since there are a jillion people looking for that kind of stuff. Also, wouldn't shipping put a dent in any savings you got?
I don't actually know. But I have the vague belief that eBay is big enough, and has enough non-expert sellers, that an expert buyer willing to be obsessive has a good shot of buying things cheaply in most areas. This only works if you're expert enough to know what you're looking for and know what a good price is, and you're willing to wait, none of which applies to me.
80: Some people can take public transportation to IKEA. That's how i got my furniture 7 years ago.
But after reading the latest New Yorker, with the article telling how books only burden your descendents, mask ignorance and impress noone, I may never buy a book again.
Ha. And people actually read the New Yorker?
Seriously, though, what on earth is that about? Is it something about marking trends ever so slightly ahead of the game (i.e. if you have actual books, you probably don't have a Kindle or similar, you dork, and everyone knows books have no resale value, so why would you own them)?
I can safely say that the books I own impress no one who gets close enough to the shelves to read the titles. From a distance of six or seven feet, they may impress through sheer volume.
82 sounds more like craigslist. Not so much eBay.
83: ths is true, and we've done it. For instance, IKEA Wembley runs a shuttle bus from Stonebridge Park tube station. It runs very frequently, too: one bus every 45 minutes. Well, more of a van than a bus, actually. And unmarked, apart from a note taped to the windscreen, so keep a sharp eye out!
Also, the drivers will deny they were planning to go to IKEA. It's expected that you'll have to threaten them somewhat to get them on the road -- best to bring firearms.
Anyhow, the reason I mentioned forums is that for the other desirable yet nerdy things that I've looked at (older, top-of-the-line bicycles and older, pretty-high-end stereo equipment) forums are really the way to go; anybody who sells anything good on eBay pretty much knows they'll be able to command a premium for it.
the vague belief that eBay is big enough
But the thing is, the number of potential buyers is also huge. If something nice gets offered for way under its value, you are very seldom the only person to notice.
Ha. And people actually read the New Yorker?
Yup. On my Kindle, in fact.
I do, in fact, have very little idea what I'm talking about -- the only stuff I've bought off eBay with any success is women's business clothes.
84: it's possible that this article only appeared in the iPad edition. Actually, I think the gist of the piece was that getting the book onto your shelf is only the first small step in producing something of intellectual / artistic value. But god knows, there are worse things by far to be proud of than ownership of unread / under-used books. I know for sure that there are books I own that I'll never read, or read properly, but not for sure which ones. I might come to make good use of any of them, for all onlooker x believes.
I don't know about furniture, but for old tools you can find functional "users" for relatively cheap (cheaper than antique stores, anyway) on eBay, but the mint condition stuff is ridiculously expensive. Whether or not it bears out in practice, I have a hunch that auctions that end at weird hours, especially if you can enter a bid in the last minute or so, give you your best shot at a good price.
As a side note, I should note that it's bewildering to me that people collect plumb bobs and old yard sticks. WTF?
An academic though I be, I don't primarily think of books as for using.
95: have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful?
especially if you can enter a bid in the last minute or so
Use a sniping service, people. Don't run up the price for all the rest of us.
97: Some art on the walls, a metric ass-load of books, my children. I moved cross-country a year ago, I cleared out a *lot* of crap.
It's not that I'm objecting to collecting per se, just the particular objects of fascination.
97: If my wife reads that, I'll get kicked out.
Oh, yeah - I suppose it's the minority of Ikeas in the US that can be reached by public transit.
98: Wait, what? How does a sniping service run things up less than doing it manually?
96: I admit, I no longer enjoy reading so much. I enjoyed the Kinsey Report, though; a copy of which was stored by my parents in the attic sometime in the 60s and discovered there by me in the 70s.
102: entering a bid manually -- even at the last minute -- gives people whose bid cap may have been reached a chance to respond. Plus, if you set a snipe and then do your best to forget about it, you won't be tempted to raise YOUR bid if the item starts getting bid up.
I have double digits of Billy bookshelves and lots of other Ikea things to put things in. The DE started with a few them before I moved out here and we just continued adding as stuff got unpacked and more stuff got bought. It won't get this place into House Beautiful or Archetypical Digest which is a plus.
If something nice gets offered for way under its value, you are very seldom the only person to notice.
And if you and a few others are the only ones who do notice, you'd scarcely tell anyone else about it.
93: I'm guessing from this that the article was about or directed to status anxiety.
Our most expensive piece of furniture, large Pottery Barn couch, was acquired cheaply by purchasing a condo with said item inside it and no easy way to remove it- I think the previous owners had brought it in with a crane.
If the Somerville Ikea ever gets built, I see great hilarity ensuing with people trying to cram their boxes into the orange line.
Couch:condo::Plastic ring:box of cereal
Heh. I was deeply annoyed that when I left my last house, I also left behind the landlord's variety of furniture (almost all Ikea) that had been in it when we'd moved in: solid kitchen table, bed frame that I had been using, pretty nice shelves, etc.
The landlord had sold the house; I figured, well, this furniture is hers, not mine, and I imagine she will empty the place out, so I'll leave it as I found it. A few weeks later I went by the house to check for any stray mail that'd been delivered, to see all of that furniture tossed out by the side of the street by the new owners. Jesus. What a waste.
re: 75
As a habitual haunter of guitar and camera forums, prices are rarely bargains although the overall quality/reliability of goods sold tends to be somewhat better -- people have reputations they are invested in -- than the shite sometimes sold as 'mint' on ebay. So I'm not sure if the forums == bargains thing generally holds. Although I do know of one forum where it's possible to get real bargains on classic camera gear.
In the UK I've found ebay camera prices are often more expensive now than dealers, though.
I guess I don't know where to look, then? Where do you get mid-century stuff that doesn't have massively inflated prices?
This may be multiply pwned--I went and had dinner--but basically ebay and craigslist. I got my Heywood Wakefield stuff and a few things that aren't big names like that (um, among furniture nerds, which I only marginally am) for not all that much.
So ok the thing about mid-century furniture is that the stuff that costs a lot is not the only attractive stuff, so for instance I have a nice step table that is god knows what designer, but it's quite nice. Wasn't a fortune, was shipped to me by greyhound. I guess if you're looking at Eames and C. Jere (as opposed to the thousand knockoffs) and Kagan &c&c&c, it's not especially cheap on there because, yeah, people know what they can get for it, and can indeed get that for it.
I like sinking endless time into finding neat furniture. My favorite thing would be to spend a weekend wandering one of those oddball tent-city style markets of old crap.
(We don't have any room left to justify buying anything else, though. I really, really want to keep this place from feeling cluttered.)
69: utters hollow cough "I'm right here, you know."
This may be multiply pwned--I went and had dinner--but basically ebay and craigslist. I got my Heywood Wakefield stuff and a few things that aren't big names like that (um, among furniture nerds, which I only marginally am) for not all that much.
You can't be "marginally" a furniture nerd. That's like saying "I guess you could call me a fan of dinosaur-car porn". Virtually nobody even knows that such a thing as a furniture nerd exists. You are definitely a furniture nerd.
114: Yesterday I walked through the Occupy Pittsburgh camp and it really did look like that sort of camp. They weren't selling, of course, but they had ware-tents and whatnot.
What do they turn into on a full moon?
Those were-tents. But then on a full moon...?
Stupid Old English fossil words that have survived into our modern language.
Anyway, the Occupy people had a couple of biggish tents fill with various warm things. Also, some of the tents were now on pallets.
But I have the vague belief that eBay is big enough, and has enough non-expert sellers, that an expert buyer willing to be obsessive has a good shot of buying things cheaply in most areas. This only works if you're expert enough to know what you're looking for and know what a good price is, and you're willing to wait
In Mrs y's experience, this is certainly true. We have acquired quite a lot of Victorian/Edwardian furniture as cheap or cheaper than IKEA. But you do have to wait.
re: 124
My experience with camera gear is that it's possible, but that there are quite a few people who know what they are looking for, so the wait can be long. It's not so much non-expert sellers, as a large pool of expert buyers keeping prices high.
Those were-tents. But then on a full moon...?
This Hallowe'en, the excitement is in tents.
I got a classic peacoat for $5 plus shipping, second bid attempt. I got a pre-reissue souvlaki cd for maybe 15$
maybe things are worse now