this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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In my experience, it's a choice between decent Ikea shelves that don't sag after a few years of use and super shitty Walmart furniture that falls apart in about 6 months.
Aside from the price of good quality wooden furniture, it's heavy as hell which is rough when you're a renter and moving every few years. There's also a lot of wooden furniture, old or new, is just as poorly constructed with peeling veneer and failing staples. Not everyone has the time, money, or space to fix that up.
And all that being said, Ikea isn't really that expensive for what it is. Their soft furnishings and decorative items seem overpriced, but their storage products (mostly what I get from them) are pretty decently priced. Yeah I've had my issues with missing parts and shitty customer service, but all in all my experience has been positive enough to keep going back.
I still want to get a couple really nice, high quality items, but I'm not going to break the bank every time I need a bookshelf.
Not to mention, they do sell actual nice solid furniture for decent prices. For example, my current dining table from Ikea is solid wood, not veneered particle board, and was less than $200 dollars. I'll gladly take the 5 minutes it took to screw the legs on for a decent piece of furniture at that price.
I also have a few of those adjustable metal shelves from Ikea, which have been sitting on my balcony for two years now, exposed to the elements, with not a single spot of rust on them. Those were about half the price of comparable shelves from a big box store, which rusted out in less than a year.
Sure Ikea sells some cheap crap that disintegrates if you look at it wrong, and that sucks, but if you're just a little more selective about what you buy there, you can get stuff that'll last at a very reasonable price.