I had extensive experience with Ikea up until a few years ago.
When I was a student, it was a good source of affordable furniture, but much of it was too cheaply made to last more than a few years or looked super cheap even if it was sturdy (here’s not lookin’ at you, Ivar). Anything with doors or drawers, and many other things, usually suffered from imprecise factory-made drill holes. The housewares are either inexpensive and flimsy or no more affordable or attractive than alternatives from any major department store.
But the final straw came when I was willing to buy some of their nicer stuff. I’d always known that a big part of the savings at Ikea came from the bring-your-own-labour aspect, but it seemed to be carried to an absurd extreme when I wanted a couple of bed frames w/ headboards.
We picked them out in the showroom and found a staffer, who entered some info in the computer and printed out a list of parts. We would then have to go to the warehouse and get a bunch of different pieces from different places, have most of it delivered, then do an unusually elaborate assembly. This was way beyond a flat-pack table or bookcase. It was insanity. I finally had enough. Crumpled up the paper and left.
There were other things (like recurring inventory issues and awful suburban locations that make no sense for a city dweller) that eventually led me to want to replace every last stick of Ikea furniture in my home. Not only was I able to do it fairly easily, I was able to do it affordably by buying vintage pieces.
There are just too many compromises and false economies involved in most Ikea stuff for me to be willing to bother with any of it. I’m sure it’s different for some people, like the ikeahackers, but as an ordinary buyer of ordinary furniture and housewares, Ikea sucks pretty bad.
You’d be surprised (maybe) at how many people DO want a ‘relationship’ with their retailer, coffeeshop, floor cleaner, or food truck. I used to do marketing/design work, and Relationship Marketing is huge business, mainly with 20-30 year old women. It never failed to amaze me how many customers eagerly want to talk about their dish detergent. It’s why IKEA wants to own that segment of their customer base after purchase. Keep talking to customers about their chairs and lamps, and they’ll come back for more (in theory).
All I’ll say is that I’ve been using the same IKEA desk, shelves, and furniture for the last eight years or so, and they’re the most durable furniture for the price I’ve ever owned. This Jerker desk is built like iron.
I’m sure there are good buys to be had…just none that I personally consider worth the time and hassle to identify, purchase and assemble. That’s my fundamental beef with Ikea: the sticker price may be low, but it comes with too much of an investment in time for my taste.
This may or may not apply to you. For example your nearest store might not be located like mine – near a horrible freeway interchange that’s badly congested for large chunks of the day. Which means I need to plan on at least an hour in the car on top of the time it takes to get through the store (another hour, minimum), all the while running the risk that the website’s inventory status is wrong again, making the whole trip completely pointless. Which is what happened with my last – and final – trip to Ikea. An hour on the road for absolutely nothing.
To add insult to injury, the next nearest store had the item in stock but there was no mechanism for reserving one so we could guarantee it would be worth our while to make that added trip. Which makes no sense when all the stores are corporate, not franchised, as I believe is the case with Ikea.
I will totally agree about their bizarre customer service. With all that’s typically involved in a major IKEA trip (getting a Uhaul or borrowing a van, driving there, etc), I’m baffled that there’s no actual way to reserve items. Before a store opened locally, some friends of mine rented a truck and drove from Boston to New Jersey after calling the store and ‘reserving’ a living room full of new furniture. They arrived and were told that reserving items was impossible and that everything they wanted was out of stock, despite the promises of the high school kid they’d talked to on the phone.
Yep, Ikeafans may have nominative use on their side. Unfortunately, to keep it on their side, they’ll have to prove that they were a fully independent entity. Basically to have nominative use accessible as a claim you can’t get any “sponsorship or endorsement” by the copyright holder - they couldn’t even link directly to Ikea’s site. Ikea may claim that they gave sponsorship to Ikeafans, because they provided insider information to the site. Even the site owners openly state that Ikea worked with them. Information is as good as cash in business.
That said, Ikeafans still has the fact that Ikea was well aware of the use for several years - even working cooperatively with the site owners - right up until they decided to have an online presence on their own. Only then did they decide to clear out the existing sites with followers by taking over the domain names for themselves. (They also did it by gleaning information on how to run their own community site from the sites they now want to shut down.) Since that smacks of an anti-competitive practice, a decent judge will heavily frown on the behavior. This may be another reason for the attempted change of venue.
Yep, I posted that to the original thread about IH. What happened, happened in this order. IH got a C&D from Ikea. IH responded, and said she’d fight them. Ikea was surprised. They came to a temporary agreement that IH could retain the domain if no revenue-based ads were run on the site (!). So IH said on the site (paraphrased), “Since my ability to make a living is being yanked out from under me, I’m leaving this domain in a few months. Currently shopping around, and could use suggestions for a new domain name.”
Fans of the site were seriously displeased. For some reason, Ikea thought the the site owner wouldn’t tell anyone at all what was going on! So . . . now they’re apparently going back to talks, but the site owner is still domain shopping, and may still end up moving. In the meantime, the story has been lifted from main part of the site. You have to go look for it. At one point it was on the front page.
Nonsense. It’s true that you can’t claim to have sponsorship that you don’t have - but there’s nothing to say that you can’t accept sponsorship by the trademark holder. If you do have sponsorship, you most likely have an agreement to that effect, and have a stronger defense of condonation or promissory estoppel. But referring to a product by name, or linking to where you can find it on the web, doesn’t become any less noominative because the trademark holder sponsored it. Otherwise, a trademark holder could say, “I sponsor ikea-haters.net,” send its administrators some inside information, and use that to shut it down, rendering nominative use meaningless.
While I personally think being an “ikeafan” is a pretty sad state of affairs, I also have to downvote your furniture snobbery. I have a friend who owns a furniture manufacturing business. When he saw my extremely low-end ikea couch (I think I paid $300 or $400?) he spent a while inspecting it and wondering how they’d managed to make it at that price point with that grade of foam. Obviously the answer is volume, but the point is that I wouldn’t be able to get a product with that particular quality level for that price otherwise.
It may not be the best of design, but it brings decent design to the masses at a low price point.
The nominative use defense may be interpreted this way:
[W]here the defendant uses a trademark to describe the plaintiff’s product, rather than its own, we hold that a commercial user is entitled to a nominative fair use defense provided he meets the following three requirements: First, the product or service in question must be one not readily identifiable without use of the trademark; second, only so much of the mark or marks may be used as is reasonably necessary to identify the product or service; and third, the user must do nothing that would, in conjunction with the mark, suggest sponsorship or endorsement by the trademark holder.
So, here’s the problem Ikeafans (IF) might run into. Because they worked directly with Ikea, they received insider information. For example, the company provided them with updates about products getting ready to hit the shelves. Ikea actually worked with IF, and that means that - although the site was independently owned - it had better information than similar sites might have. The argument could be made that a user might interpret the better information as an endorsement by the company. It’s a hazard they should be guarding against, but they aren’t.
There’s another way to interpret the nominative defense, and it doesn’t involve whether or not sponsorship exists. Rather, it takes a two-step approach: first it demands that the plaintiff prove confusion is likely due to the use of the plaintiff’s mark. Then, it gives three tests to the defendants.
(1) that the use of plaintiff’s mark is necessary to describe both the plaintiff’s product or service and the defendant’s product or service; (2) that the defendant uses only so much of the plaintiff’s mark as is necessary to describe plaintiff’s product; and (3) that the defendant’s conduct or language reflect the true and accurate relationship between plaintiff and defendant’s products or services.
This version of the legal interpretation alters the requirements regarding the relationship between plaintiff and defendant. Rather than automatically assigning fault to the defendant if the relationship shows any benefit from the plaintiff, it only demands that defendant be honest about the relationship (the IF owners have been, all along). Huge difference, and in a case like this one, it would really matter a lot which version of the test they chose to apply. One might get them into trouble and one definitely wouldn’t.
One of the biggest problems with laws regarding trademark (etc.) is that they aren’t enforced stably, and the results of a court case are typically at the whim of the judge on the bench.
I think once you get the hang of how Ikea stuff fits together, assembling it isn’t that big of a deal - it’s kind of like an easy Lego set. My method for visiting Ikea is to ignore the main shop and go the ‘wrong’ way around - start with the seconds, which are often not broken, just assembled. I don’t usually make firm decisions before visiting the store itself, so I don’t really have the same issues with items being out of stock. My local Ikea has U-haul style trailers which you can use for free for 3 hours, so that also gives it an advantage over some of the other furniture stores in the area. I agree that Ikea isn’t particularly strong, but it has the advantage of being a lot stronger than other furniture in its price range, having a clear focus on functionality and being simple enough to be able to use around the house (or hack, if need be). Having said that, I usually only buy Ikea if I can’t find what I need second hand.
I have come to the same conclusion with Ikea stuff. I have a weird space in my kitchen and it just so happens that one of the only pieces of furniture that will fit there exactly is an Ikea piece; actually one of their better ones made of wood. I’ve gone to look at it twice and each time just got a sinking feeling at the pit of my stomach that this was going to be money wasted; money spent on something that I’d throw away in two years and it would be bent and wretched and falling apart. And even if it held together,it just had no soul.
For the money, I think Pier1’s furniture is much better quality, more interesting, holds up for a lot longer, and I’ve been able to reuse the pieces in a lot of different ways over the years.
I was a fairly regular Ikea customer for ~20 years, so I’m quite familiar with how it works. My eventual conclusion was that it doesn’t matter how easy it is to assemble, or how inexpensive it is, the end product isn’t good enough to be worth my time and money. Especially when factoring in the awful logistics of dealing with my particular nearest store. I realize that’s irrelevant to many people, but it’s important for me because even though I’m a fairly calm person my last few visits to Ikea left me seething with annoyance and frustration.
All things considered, this is no longer true for me – or should I say I agree it applies to Ikea’s cheap stuff, but not its more expensive stuff. I would have agreed wholeheartedly in the early, penniless years of my life as an Ikea customer, but as I got older and more solvent (but by no means rich) I have come to see less and less value in Ikea’s wares.
What I wonder is: how much of my own transformation is idiosyncratic, and how much is commonplace? It took me quite a long time to reach a firm conclusion that I was done with Ikea forever. There were times when I went back more out of habit than any rational consideration of my entire situation – I was a “zombie” customer. I can’t help but thinking that for a lot of Ikea customers over 40 it’s simply the place where they got used to furnishing their spaces when they were in their 20s.
There are a number of things that I wouldn’t buy from Ikea - the beds look really weak and would probably break completely in situations where an older style would be fine or be slightly damaged. I have a wardrobe that is still in action after about 15 years, but structurally it’s pretty weak and probably wouldn’t survive if I tried to move it. This seems to be the way with a number of their products - they’re made of chipboard and will work OK if you keep within the weight limits and don’t disassemble them, but if you move every few years they’ll show their limitations pretty quickly. I quite like some of their cooking equipment, which is often both cheaper and better than I can get elsewhere. Very little of my furniture is actually Ikea, but it is a place I’ll still visit occasionally if I can’t find what I want otherwise; free trailer rental and the fact that it’s only a mile away also help.
I don’t have the numbers, but I suspect that there are more options to get cheaper furniture in the US, so Ikea doesn’t seem like such a good deal. When I first moved here, we were looking for mattresses - I found some single mattresses in the seconds section for about 100 EUR each, but the same quality was about 5 times as much in our local cut price mattress shop. TBH though, I’m probably about 5 years behind you when it comes to Ikea - I’ll usually come back with very little because I know places where I can get something better for less (usually not new though).
I think that depends on your economic situation a bit.
I am certainly not arguing that IKEA furniture is the be-all and end-all in absolute terms. If I had substantially more money I probably wouldn’t shop there either. However at least here you would be hard pressed to find anything better at comparable prices. For many people - including me - it just makes sense, especially at a stage in life where chances are that your furniture won’t be forever even if it lasts.
My parents underwent a transformation similar to yours. When they were young they were rather enthusiastic IKEA shoppers. Then once they were financially significantly more comfortable they reduced it gradually. Eventually almost the only thing they bought there was kids’ furniture. If you move every few years and have up to four kids who treat their furniture the way kids do and have devolping tastes and requirements, then there is little reason to pretend that you are buying heirlooms.
I wouldn’t say IKEA furniture isn’t practical or useful, just that it has no soul. I like furniture that has history and a uniqueness to it. Sometimes that’s more expensive but sometimes it’s just a matter of happening upon a nice piece. If you want furniture that’s practical, reasonably priced and looks like every other IKEA showroom, by all means have at it.
That’s more or less my point. At a stage in life when all you can afford is cheap stuff, or you know you don’t need things that are built to last, I think Ikea is just fine, though most people can probably still do better buying second hand. (A minor regret of mine is not having clued in to thrift shops, flea markets and estate sales at an earlier age.)
But Ikea also has plenty of stuff that’s designed and priced for those of us who can afford something better – and I’m not talking rich, just reasonably successful adulthood – and as far as I’m concerned that is where you start to get into poor value at Ikea. All things considered, from money and time to design and quality, I see plenty of better options. Their prices at the high end imply a certain level of durability (including timelessness in design), but I’m not convinced it’s there. Or at least not often enough to make it worth my while to bother with.
