3 ms·

I have to admit, they seem to have been pretty thorough with their experiment, but I still think the main draw of Ikea isn't that you put it together yourself,

I have to admit, they seem to have been pretty thorough with their experiment, but I still think the main draw of Ikea isn't that you put it together yourself, but that it's so much cheaper. I bought some barstools the other day for $20 each. And while technically I assembled them, that isn't why I like them. I like them because I was at a barstool store and the cheapest ones there were $300 each! (Which I was willing to pay, if there were some that I liked enough. There weren't.) They only thing I can think that they didn't test would be whether or not seeing someone put the item together made a difference. If they just observed, but they didn't help. This would help determine if the draw was in knowing how (and how well) it was constructed, or that they did it themselves.

neonkiwi 15y ago
I agree, Ikea is popular because of the price. Build-it-yourself and low price for Ikea furniture are related through these aspects: * It turns out assembly does not create nearly as much value as the other steps in the manufacturing process in furniture. I couldn't sell you the chips of wood that went into the MDF of your Ikea dresser for anything near the price of the dresser, though it's a major component. * The cost of assembling furniture on a large scale is greater than the cost of manufacturing the components. Putting pegs into holes using a machine is a hard enough engineering problem (that's one reason behind surface mount electronics), let alone the rest of the assembly. Of course, the way a piece of furniture comes together is different with machine assembly, but there is still cost here. * The volume of flat-packed furniture waiting to be assembled is a small fraction of the assembled volume. This impacts shipping as well as warehousing costs. Both 'build-it-yourself' and 'low price' are true for Ikea furniture, and due to their correlation, it's easy to pick the wrong one as the cause of success. (Of course, correlation does not imply causation, but as I said at the start of this comment, I think price is causing popularity)

neonkiwi 15y ago

I agree, Ikea is popular because of the price. Build-it-yourself and low price for Ikea furniture are related through these aspects: * It turns out assembly does not create nearly as much value as the other steps in the manufacturing process in furniture. I couldn't sell you the chips of wood that went into the MDF of your Ikea dresser for anything near the price of the dresser, though it's a major component. * The cost of assembling furniture on a large scale is greater than the cost of manufacturing the components. Putting pegs into holes using a machine is a hard enough engineering problem (that's one reason behind surface mount electronics), let alone the rest of the assembly. Of course, the way a piece of furniture comes together is different with machine assembly, but there is still cost here. * The volume of flat-packed furniture waiting to be assembled is a small fraction of the assembled volume. This impacts shipping as well as warehousing costs. Both 'build-it-yourself' and 'low price' are true for Ikea furniture, and due to their correlation, it's easy to pick the wrong one as the cause of success. (Of course, correlation does not imply causation, but as I said at the start of this comment, I think price is causing popularity)