I just have to say, MOST of the posts in this thread have been quite thoughtful. This is salon (or Salon) at it's best - thought provoking. It still deserves the name. Thanks, people

IKEA is supposedly bad because they produce cheap quality items -- they are not heirloom pieces.

Actually, a lot of the IKEA stuff is nice. Real wood. Solid. We have two huge, sturdy, real wood bookshelves from them that are packed with books and have been moved to a different house at least three times. The store originated in Europe where everybody does not have a pickup truck. So you can buy furniture and still drive an environmentally friendly vehicle. Isn't exporting labor to the consumer a good thing when the alternative is low wage labor in China?

On the other hand, the author complains that IKEA uses too much wood. Well, the alternative is pressboard. Does that create an heirloom piece?

IKEA is no Wal-Mart. They want to do the right thing and are generally pretty progressive. They just sell a lot of furniture. Better them than some company who does not give a damn.

"Shell notes that among economists, [Wal-Mart] has its defenders." - Stephanie Zacharek

The principle economic defense of Wal-Mart is that in a world of scarce resources, it makes economic sense (and some maintain that it is a moral imperative) to use resources as efficiently as possible.

This defense unravels when applied to labor as a resource. For one thing, there is no global scarcity of labor. (In the context of the debate, we aren't talking about skilled labor.) And for another thing, treating labor as a resource may make an economic defense of Wal-Mart amenable to mathematical analysis, but no amount of mathematics can account for the human dignity associated with labor as craftmanship.

I know this company pretty well because I work with them. I know that it treats its employees like the long-term investments they are and gives them full benefits. And I know they are leaders on the issue of child labor. That's not much like Wal-Mart now, is it?

Your case for hypocrisy rests on the fact that they give names to non-heirloom items? WTF? How does that follow?

Forestry? Does anyone do any better? Does Wal-Mart have even 11 inspectors? Show me a company that does a better job that IKEA before you start equating it to a company that is synonymous with union-bashing and community destruction.

And then your complaint that there is insufficient "craftsmanship" in the pieces. Is there more "craftsmanship" in furniture that is manufactured and assembled on assembly lines?

The whole IKEA business is based on making products inexpensive enough so that as many people as possible can have better lives with nicely designed stuff. It's a success because it acts for the long term with enlightened self-interest.

Have you ever really looked at goods in an Ikea store? I have a number of pieces, with and without glass, and the glass is solid. I don't buy their lower end products. I used to, when I was broke, and I still have some Billy bookcases in our mudroom. Now, the furniture we have is solid hardwood, lightly stained and waxed. The glass is solid and has survived years of wear. The furniture is durable and drawers and doors function as well as when we bought it (quite well). I don't like their sofas much. They don't do overstuffed - and I like a comfy sofa. There is cheap for people who want cheap and some high end choices (My favorite is leksvig, a very extensive line of solid wood products). And it's not just furniture. My favorite frying pan is a cast iron pan from Ikea. They are not just cheap. They provide what people need - from cheap to high quality.

I worked at IKEA in Tempe,Arizona, for over a year. We would come to the store and about 3 am, unload the trucks and place merchandise on the floor. We would leave at about 10 am. The turn over in employees was extremely high. The supervisors were abusive and unprofessional.The sales personnel were always fighting the stockers. We were required to attend "mandataory" meetings during our days off. After I quit I never have shopped there. I hate that place.

Don’t buy anything made in China.

Just keep borrowing their money to sustain us until the End Times.

If they threaten to cut off credit, smile nicely and promise to buy something for a little while.

The End Times will come before they catch on.

Did anybody bothered to mention that hipster-approved Target was exactly as bad as Walmart in all the ways mentioned (low employee pay, stuff from China, etc.)? Yet it never comes in for hysterical bashing and blame that Walmart does. I guess if you have trendy ads, slick promotional materials, nice typography and more fashionable merchandise, you can pay as little wages as you can get away with and rape the environment and manufacture everything in China.

Walmart is a lot of things, but it is NOT by any stretch the cheapest place to buy most items. If you want to shop there, fine -- I don't except occasionally, but it is because it's not the cheapest and the lines are long -- and I do know that in some parts of the US, Walmart is the ONLY discount store (sometimes the only store period) around. But it is ridiculous to formulate arguments about where to shop (or how to manufacture goods for an ENTIRE NATION) based on upper class snobbery.

What it Walmart DOES have, is nearly everything in one place, especially in the "SuperCenters". This is a boon to ultra-busy working families who simply do not have the LUXURY OF TIME to bargain hunt and troll Craigslist and comparison shop.

Few posters have bothered to discuss the brutal demands of modern life that have many of us working 50-60 hours, just to hang onto our crap jobs and health insurance, and very little free time (maybe 2 weeks off all year). Maybe it is not a TASTE (lower class, etc.) for poor quality goods so much as it is a complete inability to take the time to shop leisurely OR take a big chunk out of our shrinking incomes.

BTW -- I have a 1920s home, and long ago decided to fill it with 1920s furniture to match...a decision based as much on cheapness and lack of funds, as it was on aesthetics. BUT -- back in the 70s and 80s, there were plenty of old ladies dying or going into retirement homes, and you could pick up tons of this stuff relatively cheaply. Today, it is "art deco" and pricey antique. If you tell someone to "just go buy vintage" or thrift shop stuff, they will come home with....your parent's tired, ugly, crappy "harvest gold" junk from the 70s (and plenty of it synthetic and particleboard & melamine).

Furthermore if EVERYONE decided to shop thrift store and vintage, there would not be nearly enough of it to go around. The reason any of it exists AT ALL is because the vast majority of people prefer nice clean new furniture items, and buy them at mass market stores. To tell people to do this is unrealistic and simplistic -- and it would never work large-scale.

The question was I guess "is IKEA bad"? Well, I like IKEA and go there about twice a year (it's about 180 miles away from me). I enjoy the room displays -- so cute and charming, it makes you want a studio apartment in Stockholm! -- and my husband is a huge fan of the Swedish meatballs. But when it comes to purchasing anything, I have found their stuff to be A. rather junky, B. not as nice as what you would find in any American knock-down furniture and C. it is almost all made in China anyways. The toys and children's items are especially crude; the fabric yardage is thin and flimsy. Frankly, I find the whole place badly overrated. I guess if you really go for that Scandinavian look, and this is all you can afford, it's OK but no more than that.

Knockdown furniture is knockdown furniture, and it's mostly particle board and cheap. That might be OK for your revered "Billy" bookcases, but it won't make for much of a dining room table or china cabinet. I don't see what the difference is if your knockdown bookcase comes from IKEA or Target (or even TEH EVUL Walmart), if they are all particleboard and all made in China anyways.

Frankly, this whole argument drips with a lot of class snobbism and the idea that "some people's taste" is wayyyy better than other people's taste, and therefore good taste can be considered to be saving the environment (in some vague, unspecified way) while bad taste is ruining it...well, at least for the snobs who have to look at all the ugly stuff they don't like.

The fact is we have SIX BILLION people on this planet, and we have to have ways of feeding them, giving them clean drinking water, clothing, medicine and a place to sleep (and that's the short list), and we aren't coming up with many very good ways to do that. If we DO NOT manufacture our stuff in China, then millions of Chinese will be out of work (and crying for the days when they pulled down that $84 a month). Don't you get that we are ALL CONNECTED, that you can't do anything without it having affect somebody else?

That's what makes it so hard. That's why the coming recession/depression is going to be unimaginably rough, and we are not facing it realistically and are still basically whistling in the dark, whining about whether we are shopping at the trendiest store, and deluding ourselves that if we buy food at Whole Foods and furniture at IKEA, the whole problem will fix itself and go away.

It won't. But we might get more done if we did away with the idea that "our precious taste" is better than the next persons, or gave us any more right to an opinion.