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 d

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)