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Time after time
11 Nov 2008 02:58 pm
I just assembled a pair of boxes from Ikea for putting paperwork in. Like all Ikea products, they are superficially fetching, nearly impossible to assemble correctly without taking them apart at least once, and too flimsy to survive more than one household move. My life's ambition is to never again put together an Ikea product. I have not yet reached that halcyon plane of existence, and perhaps never will. And so I am doomed to ask myself the same question every time I pull out one of those wordless instruction manuals: how did nature, or nature's God, manage to produce an entire nation full of industrious people who assess the value of their own time at $0?
Some of us do it right the first time
You have to be pretty bad at following directions to mess up Ikea assembly. That said, I guess if you drive a moving van you'd prefer for your furniture to come assembled, but some of us need things to fit in our cars.
All my Ikea purchases have been solid and durable, too. Maybe you're shopping at Ieka?
The value of most anyone's time actually is close to $0. Most of us can't generate income at will, so assembly time comes out of leisure that couldn't have been monetized anyway.
I think putting together Ikea furniture is actually kind of fun. It involves working with your hands (a luxury to us worker bees who are in front of a computer all day) and yields a small sense of accomplishment when it's finally assembled. Sort of like a model airplane kit for adults...
"The value of most anyone's time actually is close to $0."
As evidenced by the number of blog comments Megan accumulates. Of course, I'm on my employer's buck right now...
You, Megan, are the one valuing your time at $0. You could pay more for preassembled furniture, but you choose not to.
IKEA sells furniture to people who value their time at $0. Judging from their financials, it's working out pretty well for them.
My life's ambition is to never again put together an Ikea product.
Two of my minor life ambitions have been to never eat Ramen noodles and to never watch a minute of "It's a Wonderful Life" other than as I pass between channels.
Both of those were unintentional goals where once I turned 21, I noticed the unusual results and worked to preserve it.
Likewise, I've never thought of never putting together an Ikea product as a goal, but I've never bought one and thus have never put one together. So thanks to Megan, "never putting together an Ikea product" is another "discovered" accomplishment I can tout.
"who assess the value of their own time at $0?"
Strange comment. If fully assembled competing products sold at the same price and people could get them home in their cars nobody would buy ikea products.
And ikea products are very easy to put together, even if you're mechanically challenged like me. The only reason I didn't flunk 8th grade shop is that they gave out D's just for showing up. You must be truly hopeless.
I hate, hate, hate, hate IKEA and all it stands for. If I have need to buy the type of thing that Ikea sells, I save cash and happily pay 10 ro 20 times what Ikea charges for something (1) that lasts and (2) I don't have to put together.
Blame your father and his garage full of tools he used on the weekend...
Pwned in the comments section.
-Some of us do it correctly the first time.
-Assembly is usually during leisure, which isn't monetized anyway.
-You can pay more for pre-assembled products.
Wham, bam!
I'm beginning to wonder about you, Megan. Can't manage your money and can't put together Ikea furniture. That doesn't bode well for someone who says she "needs to get serious about freelance income."
Most people, I think, can't easily get more hours of work to pay for things on short notice like that. Sure, I'm paid $XX an hour, but if I went to my boss and said 'I need a new dresser, can I work three more hours of overtime to pay for it?' I'd get a response about corporate overtime policy and business need, and wouldn't get the overtime.
Over the longer term, if I want a job where I earn more money in trade for less free time, I can probably get it. Short-term, however, there just isn't that flexibility for many people. Thus, I can't trade my free time easily on short notice for more money; the only way I can use my free time instead of cash, then, is to go the IKEA route (or any other solution that involves extra work on my part).
That's why IKEA, and similar ideas, work. There's not a very liquid market in short-term on-demand temporary employment.
i remember being at ikea one day and realizing i could never go there again. it was the day before i became an adult.
or at least a non-graduate student.
almost the same thing.
It is the way it is because their corporate obsession is with making everything easy and cheap to ship. That's their designers' starting point.
I know, who cares, but it all started to seem oddly elegant when I began looking at it in that light.
Proud owner of an Ikea bookshelf that's survived three moves. With Ikea, the real trick is finding the sturdy stuff among the flimsy. It's there, but sometimes you have to look kind of hard. It helps a lot if you live near an Ikea showroom.
I attribute IKEA's success to Branding-via-cognative-dissonance. Their goods are cheap, but exceptionally inconvienent - the very inconvience leads people to rationalize and percieve their quality as being better than it is.
This high valuation leads to a sky-high percieved cost/value ratio.
I find putting together Ikea furniture kind of relaxing - like a low-commitment version of having a woodworking hobby. I should probably create some sort of volunteer organization that goes to people's houses and puts crap together for them - everyone wins.
Quality is a mixed bag, but we definitely have some Ikea items that have survived a decade and a couple moves and still seem quite sturdy. Not as nice as the furniture made of solid wood, I suppose, but I cringe a lot less when my 3-year-old pounds the toy cars against the $79 Ikea shelf, versus the $500 cherry coffee table. There's definitely a place for cheap furniture in the world.
Megan, I'm going to improve your life. Listen and learn:
Your aquisitons will be pre-assembled and of a sturdier and more stylish construction than your Ikea gah-bage. You can thank me whenever you want.Why not buy craigslist furniture? Everything non-upholstered of mine is bought on craigslist - and usually sold at a profit a year later.
Why does the success of the Ikea model mean that we necessarily value our time at $0? If you earn $40 an hour at your job, and a bed takes two people 30 minutes to assemble, that means that the bed involves $80 worth of labor. So, as long as the bed is $80 cheaper than the next best bed that gives the buyer the same utility, it's a rational purchase, even if you value your time as much as your employer pays you for it.
You have to be pretty bad at following directions to mess up Ikea assembly
QFT
What the heck did you buy........and please tell me you stopped for a plate of their meatballs before you went home............
"I have not yet reached that halcyon plane of existence, and perhaps never will."
Unless both you and Ikea are immortal, I can assure you that you will reach that state.
Have you considered hiring immigrants to do it for you?
Aren't you a fan of The Wire? You must be using the wrong brand of scotch.
Megan, you evil monster! *What* are you doing to your furniture, that it only survives one move?
;-)
I personally like putting stuff together. I take nearly every opportunity I have to get my hands on a tool, though being a 'professional' and living in a shoebox apartment in a city does limit that a lot.
When I visit my dad, I usually go out and help him replace a ground well, wire a house or dig a trench.
I can't wait to have a workroom of my own, and to one day, as my father did, do woodworking with my kids.
The bit about leisure time having a value of $0 is absurd - of COURSE we place a value on our leisure time, usually more than we are actually paid when working (or you'd probably be trying to find more hours).
However, I suspect that Megan's personal reward function returns a considerably lower number for the joy of hours spent assembling product than the reward functions of most of her commenters.
Rationalitate - have you considered remedial math?
Megan - I'm happy I don't buy major pieces of furniture there anymore, but some of their small stuff is great, and my old desk is over ten years and four moves old - still going strong.
Shared your lament with a colleague. She says,
"That's what boyfriends are for."
Most of us can't generate income at will
Unless you're a lawyer, in which case just sue and bill by the hour. Failing that, there's the color photocopier, although the risk/reward ratio on that one is pretty high.
Megan, I'm going to improve your life. Listen and learn: First, find a good thrift store or three. Then, buy furniture there.
Third, learn what bedbugs are.
There are good bargains to be had at thrift stores but you best be very choosy.
I don't like their furnniture; I just go there for the food.
I don't like their furniture; I just go there for the food.
What do you make of hobbyism?
IKEA's non-particleboard products are actually quite solid and inventive people can make use of their "raw" materials, just as (some of) our grandparents made use of the local hardware store.
But getting back to your original point: The reality is that we live in a leisure society and thus the time spent assembling furniture is worth the price discount for many people.
I personally used craigslist extensively in the past; that's a real exchange of time for money.
@Holdfast – bad math. So it's only $40. But my point still stands.
I've never had any trouble putting together IKEA stuff, my experience is small but the diagrams are pretty clear.
But Megan has demonstrated time and time again that following instructions is not one of her strengths (part of her 'rules are for the little people' mindset) so I'm not surprised that she has trouble.
Troubleshooting: Megan, you need to look at go through the diagrams in your mind _before_ you start putting it together. Deciding what must come first and referencing the diagrams only when you're stuck is not IKEA's fault, it's yours.
As I recall, the very first thing on any IKEA assembly instruction sheet is a picture of a head with a question mark and a phone number next to it. It may be drawn in Swedish, but I believe the translation version means "call this number, if you don't know what to do". Also, IKEA delivers, and any delivery guy would gladly spend ten minutes of his time for putting together a piece of furniture for $10. That would mean his time will be valued at $60/hr, about twice as much as his likely wage. (For PC types, I'm saying "his", because the delivery guys are GUYS 100% of the time from my observations.) Then, well-assembled IKEA furniture survives abuse just as well as the pricier substitutes from Pier 1 or Ethan Allen, or any other chain.
I like Ikea. Much of my furniture comes from there, and the rest comes from Jerome's. I've never had trouble putting together one of their products and haven't experienced any trouble moving them from one house to the next, either. In most cases you can just disassemble the desk/table/whatever and transport the individual pieces with ease (particularly handy if you have a small car and don't want to hire movers).
I feel about greyhound busses the way you feel about IKEA. It was wonderful the day I said I would never ride one again and actually believed it.
As far as IKEA assembly goes, I find it to be an exciting project at first, but then the excitement wears off, the husband wanders away, the beer is gone and the project half done. Then it just freaking sucks. It's not unlike Christmas baking or putting up Christmas trees now that I think about it.
Luckily it sounds like most of the world is now too broke to do Christmas this year, an upside to everything.
Funny but Kevin Murphy covered that in econ 33101 at the GSB a couple days ago. High marginal tax rates on income was his suggestion.
I do assess the value of the time spent assembling ikea furniture at $0. I tend to do it at night, while watching TV. I wouldn't be spending that time doing anything income generating. Also, even if I did value my time more highly, some of their products are perfect. Do I want to spend hundreds of dollars at Wickes or Ethan Allen for a desk for my 5 year old? I would rather spend $100 at Ikea.
Ever since I married my husband (10 years and two kids ago), every piece of furniture we own has either come from IKEA or used from friends, neighbors, or relatives. The oldest pieces have survived 4 moves, and nearly all have survived two. A mover told us that IKEA stuff isn't meant to be moved, but I don't think we've lost a single item (even though there were some close calls). It won't break, even if I would like it to.
Now that I am Megan's age, I have a real love-hate relationship with IKEA. I'd like to move on to big girl furniture, but generally speaking 1) it's expensive 2) the quality is not that much better than IKEA's 3) we should wait until we buy our first house 4) the kids might destroy nice stuff. I'm not going to spend thousands of dollars for the privilege of buying lightly veneered particle board.
I would like nothing better than for my current cheap furniture to magically disappear and be replaced with solid items from Bed & Board or high quality built-in bookshelves and cabinets. However, in the meantime, there's nothing wrong with our IKEA dressers and nightstands and solid wood shelves. IKEA's Poang chair is beautiful, strong, comfy and an excellent value, and I think I will buy more of them in the future. I've also got a solid birch wardrobe from IKEA that we paid probably $400 for, plus probably $80-$100 for professional assembly. It's heavy as the dickens, but I've grown to love it. I've also heard a lot of people say that IKEA kitchen cabinets are the way to go if you are on a budget.
I've assemebled and installed 8 Ikea kitchens as well as numerous pieces that my architect friend has in his apartment and beach condo. (All this AFTER getting my MBA.)
It pays to read the instructions a few times but eventually you get the hang of it.
Having familiarized myself on a repeititve basis with a good cross section of their product line, my recommendation is to give yourself two hours minimum with any piece you haven't assembled before. And you NEED a screw gun or power screwdriver. Just be gentle because some of their screws can be a bit soft.
Now if they could only work on the Eastern Bloc style of merchandise order and pickup in the stores.....
My mother, a former employee of a newly unprofitable US-based furniture company, wishes that there where more people like McMegan in the world.
Oh yeah. Our Ikea bed survived 2 years of rough use in the apartment my wife and I bought a year before we were married. Then it survived being disassembled, transported 120 miles East and reassembled in the house we bought a year after we were married.
Of course that left the apartment in need of a bed for when we were in the city. We got another another (smaller, cheaper) bed -- from Ikea, natch!
IKEA has your money and you have a bunch of flat pieces lying on the floor and a leftover hex wrench. This outcome is Pareto optimal, and therefore cannot be improved on.
Seriously, most of it is not that hard to put together unless you are a klutz or deliberately avoided acquiring spatial reasoning skills (admittedly, society introduces a gender bias into that). If you can't put it together, you should be paying someone skilled to do it for you.
It's also not necessarily fragile, but you MUST avoid buying anything with particleboard in it. Particleboard is more glue than wood, and is much less stiff or strong per weight than wood or metal. So it bends, is too heavy to carry assembled, and fragments if you try to disassemble it.
how did nature, or nature's God, manage to produce an entire nation full of industrious people who assess the value of their own time at $0?
I assume the nation you're referring to is the US. Who assesses the value of their own time at $0? You do. You're the one who bought the product, electing to pay less and assemble it yourself rather than pay more for something pre-assembled. The Swedes who came up with IKEA assess the value of their own time quite highly; it's the customer's time that has little (or unpredictable) value to them, and rightly so.
"Like all Ikea products, they are superficially fetching, nearly impossible to assemble correctly without taking them apart at least once, and too flimsy to survive more than one household move."
Ikea makes some solid stuff too, they just charge a little more for it. I've had a bookshelf from them for years, and it's heavy and solid. I paid someone to put it together for me.
I'm in the process of building an entire apartment out of Ikea stuff--I'm stuck in Germany on a tight budget for a couple of years and an Ikea is nearby. Their solid wood stuff or metal stuff (my bed, kitchen table, some chairs) is OK and it's kind of relaxing to put together. But that particleboard dresser won't survive being moved within the apartment.
Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA, once wrote a treatise called, "Testament of a furniture dealer". In short, the customer having to work is a not a bug, it's a feature.
What were the boxes named?
I view Ikea as Lego for adults.
I loved building Lego things (mostly spaceships!) when I was a kid.
1) Ikea furniture isn't hard to put together. You're just bad at it.
2) Ikea furniture isn't fragile - you just suck at moving. My Ikea stuff has survived two moves and an apartment fire.
You know, I've lived in Sweden, and you've got it exactly right. IKEA furniture is designed for a country with a _marginal_ value of individual time of close to $0. And that is the result of deliberate social policy...
First, they tax the hell out of any transfer of value. The labor is more expensive than we can conceive here, plus the shipping, etc. Then the VAT just to buy the stuff is 25%. So you really want it as cheap as possible when you buy it. Then, Swedes get a government-mandated 5 weeks of vacation a year. That's the minimum. Common practice is more like 6 or 7, plus a bunch more holidays than we have. That's WAY more time than you could spend money to go away for. So Swedes take a few weeks a year to do projects around the house -- and put together their IKEA furniture. The point of combining the obscene cost (in taxes and beaurocracy) of hiring anyone to do anything for you and a bunch of mandated free time, is to get a relatively flat society. They find it offensive that some people higher a "lower class" of people to do manual work for them.
The result is efficient, servicable, well-designed, but do-it-yourself furniture.
That's funny because I remember putting together a piece of furniture thinking, "this stuff is so silly/easy to put together it must make yuppies feel really accomplished to build it, that's why everyone likes Ikea, it makes them feel like they can actually build something."
I didn't realize the flip side of the coin of people who hate Ikea and can't build anything...
> Our Ikea bed survived 2 years of rough use
> in the apartment my wife and I bought
This just might be TOO MUCH INFORMATION you let slip out.