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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday October 11 2017, @04:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the better-sell-screwdrivers-also dept.

Ikea will start experimenting with selling its famous flatpack furniture through online retailers as part of a wider push to become more accessible to shoppers.

The Swedish chain - known for its vast edge-of-town outlets - is also testing a smaller city centre store format.

Other innovations include order and pick-up points and standalone kitchen showrooms.

The moves are a response to changing shopping patterns.

Ikea has has not said which websites will be part of the test, but Amazon and Alibaba are thought to be likely contenders.

The chain sells many of its 9,500 products on its own website, but was a late arrival to the online retail market.

Waiting on an endless line at the checkout is the best part about buying Ikea's goods.


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  • (Score: 2) by richtopia on Thursday October 12 2017, @12:13AM (2 children)

    by richtopia (3160) on Thursday October 12 2017, @12:13AM (#580865) Homepage Journal

    You implied that people have finely made furniture to begin with. Ikea has always filled the starter home niche, so the Ikea furniture may not be the best, but it is functional and can be replaced gradually as required.

    I dislike the Ikea shopping experience, but they are also one of the few locations I can buy minimalist furniture from. Also, they make reasonable decisions when it comes to sustainability: they don't depend heavily on China for manufacturing most products and do take steps to responsibly source products, while maintaining competitive prices.

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  • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday October 12 2017, @08:03AM (1 child)

    by acid andy (1683) on Thursday October 12 2017, @08:03AM (#581027) Homepage Journal

    I take your point. What I take issue with is households that did have the more traditional finely made furniture and chucked it out just because "new is better" and replaced it with stuff made from MDF. There are plenty of people that do this. Also, because of those people, you can often find the finely made furniture second hand at very close to the price of the flat pack MDF item - although I appreciate you're losing the convenience factor and would likely have to pay quite a bit for delivery. It's just the "new is always better" attitude that gets to me, when in this case, it isn't.

    --
    If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
    • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday October 12 2017, @03:46PM

      by urza9814 (3954) on Thursday October 12 2017, @03:46PM (#581178) Journal

      Eh, while I'm not personally a huge fan of the "traditional finely made furniture," I do think that's a very different category than the Ikea style stuff. If I'm looking at Ikea, I'm not looking for "a bedroom dresser"; I'm looking for "some kind of long squat thing with drawers". Bedroom, living room, bathroom...doesn't matter, it's all the same. I'm not looking to buy a complete bedroom set, I'm looking for a bunch of modules that I can mix and match and modify to get the configuration I actually want. I think I only have one piece of furniture that I use exactly as designed (my kitchen table, which probably qualifies as "traditional finely made furniture"...which I was probably talked into wasting money on by my parents.) Some of that furniture I built myself; some I bought but only assembled part of it and threw the rest in my scrap bin; some I bought and then added additional parts or hardware. And I'm no carpenter, I don't have woodworking tools, I'm in a small apartment where the only power tools I can really have are a drill. But I can cut something square and I can paint it black, so that'll match any of these cheap MDF pieces just fine.

      I don't buy that stuff because it's cheap or because it's new, I buy it because it's the only available style of minimalist furniture *modules*.