I like Mitch Hedberg's take on the situation: It's really hard to assemble furniture these days. I don't speak that many languages.
Then IKEA makes things worse by making instructions with no language at all.
On April 23, 2018 at 11:06, Fins said...
With the stuff I’ve bought from there, quality has been acceptable for the price.
They could have been named CSPG, or Cheap Stuff Packed Good. This stuff has the virtue that a company in Scandinavia can make it and ship it to us without going bankrupt on the shipping costs. THAT'S IT! Expect no more. Inspect for construction before you buy. Caveat emptor.
But I have found that they have different grades of furniture. Like some cabinets have no drawer slides, the drawers just slide wood to wood.
In other words, look at what you're buying before you buy. The flimsy things I've seen there have been pretty obvious on the showroom floor. We installers should be pretty good at seeing this stuff for what it is.
And there DEFINITELY is good stuff there! For more than a dozen years, we had a wall of Billy shelf units in a wood finish, with doors with glass panels, for our books. It looked great and always worked well. We never allowed the kids to hang off of it, so it didn't break.
The instructions could use some more details, but over all they are pretty idiot proof.
That's very true. You have to look carefully at them to see if there's some little notch somewhere in the line drawing that tells you this part goes on the left or that there is the back edge of the piece.
My issues are the way the stores are built, you basically have to walk through the entire place from one end to the other to pick out what you want while navigating the cattle constantly stopping in your way,
The first few times I went there this was interesting. I quickly learned it's a minor pain in the ass, but hey -- we deal with HDMI. IKEA is nothing compared to that! These days we only go on the sales floor to look for things we haven't seen before, that is, to actually "shop."
When they first opened in the Los Angeles area in the 80s, you HAD to follow the path. Now all the local stores (including the largest one in the US in Burbank) have shortcuts. ASK THE EMPLOYEES how to get to the stuff you want to see. It's WAY easier than the path.
If we know what we want, we go in the door by the cashiers, then go ask someone in the warehouse where this or that is. Maybe I've seen enough IKEA stuff that I know how little of it I really want. That cuts down on the cattle meandering.
Remember, too, that people ARE cattle when in large numbers unless there's some particular place to go such as to your concert seat or to the parking lot to go home. People walk aimlessly, stopping, turning, behaving as though there's no other person in the world.
then go to the warehouse and pull the heavy boxes on your own, load it all on your own,
They have nicely made carts to help you with this. You're just bitching about reality.
then go home to finally assemble the stuff (crawling around on the floor for two hours killing your back and knees)
You bought from IKEA where the most basic agreement for shopping is that you put it together. This is simply to be expected.
As for quality and things wobbling, I glue together IKEA furniture. It holds together so well that I once took a multisection storage piece that was something like 16" deep and cut the back four inches off of it with a Skil saw and a jig saw. Yes, sometimes you're gluing plastic laminate to plastic laminate, but it still holds together really well unless it's one of those sets of drawers that doesn't have slides. But hey -- there's a unit on the sales floor -- you can see this before you choose it!
and have one final disagreement over arranging furniture.
Well, yeah, but I don't get why you're blaming IKEA for any of that. You're one of the more contentious members here, so I'd expect you to find some conflict.
