Yes, that's what the market wants. Ikea win because they (1) have stock (2) have a short and known delivery window (3) have a functional website (4) have showrooms if necessary (5) have instructions people can follow (6) basically invented popular flatpack furniture (7) flatpacks fit in cars, up stairs and around corners (8) they provide nominal styling choices and height adjustment (9) have economies of scale.
Many customers don't care about tomorrow (when they are on their keens cursing putting the thing they ordered together) or the next year (when they move house and it falls apart). They care about now. Convenience is king. Ikea know what they are doing.
Yes, but it's better than the utter garbage at Wal Mart and Target (better made; better designed; easier [yes!] to assemble) and better than the fugly furniture at places like Nebraska Furniture Mart (cheaper; isn't trying and failing to make it look like your $200 desk belongs to a fortune 500 executive or your $300 couch is fine leather heirloom-quality furniture; made just as well)
You have to spend quite a bit more to consistently beat it. Or you have to be really into non-trendy (so, no mid-century-modern) used furniture.
Honestly, I haven't noticed any real difference in Ikea flat-pack vs Walmart Target Wayfair (or even random Amazon listings). It is all mostly cheap junk. If you are willing to pay for the most expensive items, then you start to get real wood, but that's not their bread-and-butter.
What I usually notice from Wal Mart and Target (and other discount big-box stores) are worse veneers (thinner, easier to damage), greater likelihood that the product is already damaged out-of-the-box, much worse assembly instructions (less-clear, often with badly-translated directions that I assume were originally in Chinese or something), greater likelihood of missing parts, and (to borrow a delightful phrase from elsewhere in this discussion) terrible, coarse, void-filled "oatmeal cookie" particle board that crumbles if you look at it.
Ikea's stuff is crap (especially their lower-end items) but it's, like, good crap, by comparison.
> If you are willing to pay for the most expensive items
With IKEA, anyway, once you get into their actual quality items, they start to get more expensive than other options at the same quality level. (A caveat: I don't shop from Walmart so I have no idea about their quality scale).
'fast fashion' is not the same as utter garbage unless you just want to be a snob about things. People buy stuff from Ikea non-stop and it is perfectly ok to have 'fast fashion'.
It's not a snob thing at all. Fast fashion is a euphemism for cheap disposable clothes. That part of the clothing industry is extremely harmful both environmentally and in terms of human decency.
It's the complete disregard for environmental (and labor) impact that defines fast fashion. Nobody would care if fast fashion was just about it being cheap or disposable.
You can argue Ikea has had huge environmental impact, but you are commenting under an article that highlights some of the ways they're reducing that through materials.
