Everything about the experience from trying to find a parking space to hauling off the trash at the end has been carefully engineered to to make couples want to strangle each other

I'd rather get a vasectomy than enter IKEA. Kinda the same thing really.

I wonder if there is any activity similar to “Ambulance Chasing”.

At least their advertising is truthful. On the television add you can see the table wobble as the pull extensions out making the table bigger. Actually use their products in the add.

Noooo kidding. Aside from the horrendous furniture and cheap quality the worst is the people getting lost and stop in the aisle to figure out where they are. Unfortunately our marriage will be tested in the next few weeks. She’s found an outdoor patio set she wants to look at :/.

I will admit, ikea is like the harbor freight of the household goods world. You can get some pretty good deals on things there!

Pick and choose- I bought a few things there, but tested the floor model before buying- if it didn't wobble and had enough fasteners, it was OK. The stainless shelves don't really have anything that could go bad and for the price, it's a good deal. I know of someone who bought a whole kitchen full of cabinets and actually likes them and he's not the type to accept crap. Had a couple of small issues, but nothing terrible.

The instructions seem to have been written by a Martian, though.

With the stuff I’ve bought from there, quality has been acceptable for the price. 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. The instructions could use some more details, but over all they are pretty idiot proof. 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, then go to the warehouse and pull the heavy boxes on your own, load it all on your own, then go home to finally assemble the stuff (crawling around on the floor for two hours killing your back and knees) and have one final disagreement over arranging furniture.

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.


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.

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.

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.

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.

They have nicely made carts to help you with this. You're just bitching about reality.

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!

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.

The beach house is filled with great high end pieces from consignment stores, black Friday (online) bargains, thrift store deals, and Craigslist finds.

You wouldn't believe some of the deals I've found.

It's a better way to get stuff.



Picking up a BIG solid cherry armoire tomorrow for $25.00. It's going into the garage and will make a nicer than average tool cabinet.... :-)

Never underestimate an idiot.

The meatballs are decent.

And that’s the end of this bit

I keep saying, he's the Thread Slayer.

Casey, don't tell me you actually read that post? 20 words or less or I'm scrolling. And 20 words or less comprises about 1/1000 of a percent of the Slayers posts

Yet it took you 50% more words than that to say this simple idea.



Lieber Affiliate, wenn man auf eine Sprache, die uns fremd ist, schreiben will, muß man wenigstens recht grammatisch schreiben! Hier reden wir auf englisch, danke.

Da deine Schreibensthema nichts mit unserem Beruf zu tun hat, bitte, schreibe anderswo.

And yes, that post has as little to do with remotecentral, and as much to do with online trading, as it appears to when you skim it.

I started skimming it and saw that the humor had been lost on Mr Asperger and he had killed another one. He’s like a woman. Saturday while checking out and standing by a display of gift cards, I told my 13y/o about a friend of mine that once said he thought it would be funny to steal an unactivated Best Buy $100 gift card and give it to a friend as a joke. She laughed. My wife looked at us and said “that would be cruel” and proceeded to ask my daughter how she would feel if someone did that to her.

Ernie will make someone a good wife one day.