but a little perspective.. the car you drive, the grocery bags you use, and the lightbulbs you have in your house will all have a far greater impact on the world than the IKEA table you give away after a decade. This is all really just an excuse to feel superior over everyone else.

As someone already said, if you live in an area with any population density you'll find someone on craigslist who'll move your piece for you for a reasonable price.

And the money you spend both on the cool old piece and on getting it moved, still probably less than IKEA, all stays in your local area for another go-around. Meanwhile the only carbon footprint is the fuel used to transport it (and you'd be transporting your IKEA flatpack anyway).

I've bought a lot of IKEA in my lifetime, donated most of it recently, and really am enjoying my 110-year-old table and my 90-year-old chair and the various other things I'm furnishing my place with, slowly, as I find things I love at good prices. And when I drop dead in 50 years it'll be just as good for the people who buy it at the estate sale.

The last time I went to an RL "Shrimpfest," I was sick as a dog right afterwards--and I've got a cast-iron stomach, so I seldom if ever get ill after eating out. I suspected it was the shrimp--and haven't eaten there since. Thanks for confirming my theory. :)

"Those all-you-can-eat Red Lobster shrimps may very well have come from massive shrimp-farming spreads in Thailand, where they've been plumped up with antibiotics and possibly tended by maltreated migrant workers from Burma, Cambodia and Vietnam.

I have been very grateful for the ability to build the furniture myself because of two things.

Firstly, there have been occasions when IKEA have not designed the connecting fixtures or surfaces quite correctly; this is common in furniture of any sort; but with an explicit assembly plan as part of the package, these errors can be remedied a lot more easily than with glued together furnture which is not intended to be ever disassembled. The same goes with unintentional damage on our part.

Secondly, we have at least one IKEA wardrobe which simply could NOT have been taken upstairs had we not been able to completely dissassemble it and reconstruct it in situ. I have noticed that IKEA designs do quite well under these circumstances.

I am very concerned, however, about low wages in the source countries for timber and the possible waste (which you don't mention, though that would take a lot of specialist knowledge).

To the best of my knowledge though, IKEA are most certainly NOT responsible for intimidation, blackmail and harassment of their staff or union members. I hope this is true; if it is, it would make them a great deal more moral than certain other companies that one could immediately bring to mind.

"By contrast, I helped a friend's daughter acquire a bicycle last summer when she was dorm resident of a local university. According to the school's www site, "most students abandon their bicycles at the end of the year because it's cheaper to buy a new one than store the old one." She told me several classmates left bedding and other cheap durable goods behind, presumably for the same reason."

Seriously, the amount of stuff left behind at colleges is amazing. My brother was a resident assistant at MIT for some years. I went to visit during finals week one year, and stayed with him in his dorm room while I did interviews, toured the city, and all. Most of the students were already gone, but their consumer goods decidedly were not. I've never seen so much usable leftover stuff in my life--bicycles, tables, chairs, crockery, pots, pans, crockpots, appliances...you name it, they had it. From half-a-hallway alone, you could have outfitted two apartments and had things to spare. And over in the computer science department, a few of the labs were using last year's computers as door stops. I saw a very nice Macintosh I still wish I'd taken the time to find someone to ask for...:).

As a European I often wonder why it is that Americans care so little to deepen their knowledge of their true revolution for mankind, the money culture.

I hope the book is better than the Salon review as for facts as old as they are known.

IKEA has had to face worse criticism than the book offers in Sweden itself for years and years. This very Summer a Stockholm art center (Liljevalch´s)hosts the first exhibition on the IKEA impact on Swedish homes, an event immediately condemned even before opening for supposed lack of a critical approach.

Let alone Sweden is fanatically sensitive about environmental issues - including state authorities nowadays admonishing recipients of their e-mails to consider that replying may have consequences for the environment.

However true that IKEA has moved out of Sweden since long preferring the more tolerant Holland it is still very keen on marketing itself as Swedish selling Swedish food even and keeping its practice of naming every product after places in Sweden and by the way certainly not just picking names given men and women and most certainly not just female names as the book and reviewer erroneously suggest. In short any serious writing on Ikea makes for obligatory checking with Swedes themselves.As all Swedes speak English it is no hard task for anyone such as a Salon reviewer to contact the Swedish embassy in order to be directed to the Ikea critics in Sweden. It has been done by journalists in other countries since long.

Meanwhile all Swedes have the time of their lives wherever they are listening to non-Swedes pronouncing the names of products. The French in particular suffer badly.

Funny, but my personal boycotts of two big-box stores have been inspired by media products.

First, was Best Buy. We went there a few years back to purchase a video for a gift. They didn't have the title we wanted, and a salesclerk snottily informed us that Best Buy would be stopping the sale of VHS tapes within weeks.

It didn't know it at the time, but that was the last time I shopped at a Best Buy. It would be two years before we bought a dual VHS/DVD player, and other stores were still more than happy to sell or rent out VHS tapes. They also had the odd CD, computer game or Playstation game we were interested in, so we had no reason to treck to the burbs to patronize Best Buy.

Then Wal-Mart makes an announcement some months back that they will only sell Blue Ray movies. Really? No way am I going to buy an expensive new machine and replace all my DVDs and videos. I checked their website and they are still selling DVDs, so maybe the economy changed their minds.

I am aware that the consumer sometimes forces the obselscence of certain products, but for some reason it really riles me when a store makes the decision for me. I am well aware that there is only so much shelf space a store can have, but some of the unilateral decisions made by bigbox stores about what they will stock have nothing to do with serving the customer, and everything to do with making some sucker think he or she is very up to the minute by ditching old stuff and buying new stuff. Ridiculous.

Until IKEA plans to stop selling all mattress types with the exception of feather-filled, I doubt I would put them in the same category of waste as Wal-Mart and even Best Buy.