[HN Gopher] IKEA to discontinue its annual catalog, ending a 70-...
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IKEA to discontinue its annual catalog, ending a 70-year run
Author : RankingMember
Score : 342 points
Date : 2021-02-17 06:24 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.architecturaldigest.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.architecturaldigest.com)
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| A lot of of folks dont realize this, but there is a direct link
| between the fall of the catalog, the ascendancy of amazon, and
| the demise of sears.
|
| Back in the day, the Sears catalog was the behemoth for 3rd party
| merchant sales, backed by Sears. You could get vendor credit,
| fulfillment etc, all with sears. Virtually every service you get
| today with Amazon (FBA, ads), you could get with sears, on their
| catalog.
|
| This is why the catalog was such a big deal.
|
| It was the 20th century platform. And its dead now
| rumblestrut wrote:
| Sad to hear this. As a shopper of IKEA, I am not a fan of their
| apps or online versions for shopping. I find flipping through a
| catalog a much better experience.
| Ovah wrote:
| In the early 2000s Sweden it was not uncommon to have a 'No
| advertising thank you, except for the IKEA catalog' sticker on
| your mailbox.
| samsari wrote:
| Still is.
| rags2riches wrote:
| Examples:
|
| https://lindawestermark.blogg.se/2009/august/ikea-katalogen....
|
| https://sweden.kcomposite.com/ingen-reklam-tack/
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| Ahh, IKEA, where people buy their furniture for the _Arch Linux
| effect_.
| kryptiskt wrote:
| The IKEA museum has all the (Swedish) catalogues archived here:
| https://ikeamuseum.com/sv/ikea-kataloger/
| dirtyid wrote:
| Wanted to collected IKEA catalogs until I realized they vary by
| region due to item availability _. Still they 're fun reads, I
| wish they compiled a big annual PDF of all IKEA products. Would
| subscribe.
|
| _ Someone commented below pandemic online shopping has crippled
| IKEA, but I hope they get things sorted and eventually figure out
| logistics of shipping items between region. Lot's of interesting
| accessories like Asian cleavers and and woks in Asia market. I
| know you can get those from any brand, but I like my 365+
| collection. Also update some of the garbage planning tools, a few
| of them still use flash early this year.
| rzzzt wrote:
| What am I going to read in the restroom, then?
| mcv wrote:
| Ages ago I heard that the IKEA catalog was the second most
| printed book in the world, after the Bible. Considering it was
| reprinted every year, often ignored or thrown away, and
| completely superceded by websites, it's probably about time it
| was discontinued.
|
| Yes, I also have childhood memories of reading through that
| thing, but these days if I want something from IKEA, their
| website is the first and only stop. Let's save these trees.
| acomjean wrote:
| Reminds me of printed phone books. Every unit in my 35 unit
| building would get a new one every year. They'd sit in a pile
| (how many phone books do you need). For a couple years they'd
| stack this years phone book on last years phone book.
|
| Now not needed.
| rement wrote:
| Reminds me of when I was in elementary school and we would
| have "phone book" drives. The class that collected the most
| phone books to be recycled would get some kind of prize. I
| remember walking around my neighborhood with a wagon
| collecting phone books. Good times.
| paxys wrote:
| Not sure you can call it a reprint if the content inside is
| completely different. If that was the case then a popular
| weekly magazine would anyways have way more total prints.
| switch007 wrote:
| It seems to me like companies start/speed-up 'green' initiatives
| in a recession. If memory isn't failing me, around 2008 and
| thereafter hotels started nagging us about water usage, urging us
| to reuse towels, skip cleaning etc.
| hedora wrote:
| I'll miss the digital version of the catalog. It sounds like
| that's discontinued too.
|
| I kind of wonder if Ikea is going to survive covid. Their web
| page says everything I want is chronically out of stock. I don't
| see why they can't pivot to touchless pickup or delivery.
|
| Instead, I've been buying furniture online from more than one of
| their competitors. The experience and quality control are worse
| than an in-store Ikea run, but the selection is better. It's a
| step sideways, I suppose.
| kevincox wrote:
| IKEA has delivery, at least to Toronto. However it is very
| expensive and most things were out of stock for a long time or
| restricted for in-store only (although it seems that a lot is
| back in stock now).
| russellbeattie wrote:
| I just got (and am currently typing this on) a Samsung S7+
| tablet. It's massive and has taken me a while to get used to, but
| if we truly want to get rid of paper, this is the size e-readers
| and tablets need to be. Since this thing is basically a giant,
| relatively delicate pane of glass and metal and not even remotely
| cheap, I think it'll be a while yet.
| rchaud wrote:
| As someone who's been attempting to read print magazines in
| digitized from since the iPad came out, I've come to realize
| that it's not about screen size, but convenience and
| disposability.
|
| Convenience because I can stuff it in a bag or leave it on a
| coffee table, and not worry about its physical condition.
| Convenience also because I can flip to any page and start
| reading from there. On a tablet I'd need to use the horizontal
| scrollbar to fast forward through pages and it doesn't feel the
| same.
|
| Reading a magazine on something that weighs over a pound is not
| comfortable. I never felt like I was kicking back and chilling
| with a magazine, just that I was holding a heavy, expensive
| piece of glass to read something I could have bought on the
| newsstand for 7 bucks.
| durnygbur wrote:
| Their catalogues didn't contain a single photography. You watch
| CGI-porn with oversaturated colors and go to their place and
| purchase furnitures from cartboard and paper. It's as if McDonals
| was releasing paper catalogue with their menus.
| dawnerd wrote:
| That's not true. There's a documentary on ikea that shows them
| taking photos. They use CGI but it's not 100%.
| Spivak wrote:
| I mean sure but when I post to IG I can add lights and
| oversaturate my colors too. Like it feels weird to complain
| that professional photography (including all the staging,
| lighting, and editing work) actually makes things look better.
| eru wrote:
| You know that McDonald's has some interesting trick up their
| sleeves for their advertising pictures, too?
| Hamuko wrote:
| Most restaurants do. I remember that whipped cream is usually
| replaced with shaving cream and everything is usually full of
| toothpicks to keep it together.
| choward wrote:
| Most of the stuff isn't edible and would kill you. Lots of
| glue.
| athenot wrote:
| I have a relative who was making these "food" items out of
| acrylic and resin in art school 20 years ago. She had made
| a lobster on a bed of ice cubes that looked so real (and
| was intended for high resolution photography).
|
| Another project involved some beverage being poured into a
| wine glass... it was actually constructed horizontally on a
| pane of transparent glass, with a half wine glass
| constructed over it. Truly amazing.
| rchaud wrote:
| That's part of the fun, and the 'inspiration'. Of course you
| know that the items alone won't get you that IKEA look. And
| most people don't want that anyway. It's the whole package the
| catalog offered; room lighting, wall paint, window positions,
| curtain types and furniture placement. Being able to to look at
| this on a magazine-sized canvas (as opposed to a tiny mobile
| screen where everything is in neat grids) that causes our minds
| to run free with the possibilities.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Has anybody asked GPT-3 to come up with fictional Ikea product
| names? That would be hilarious!
| Hamuko wrote:
| Just shuffle a Swedish dictionary.
| ToFab123 wrote:
| That catalog was cycling around all internet design bureaus in
| Denmark (Sweden and Norway too) for years around year 2000. IKEA
| carpet bombed everyone with the task on how to put that catalog
| online. No matter where you applied for a job they all said they
| were working on the IKEA catalog. I have spend countless hours in
| various workshops with that catalog. Happy to learn that the
| mission finally has been completed and happy for all the trees
| this will save.
| konschubert wrote:
| I don't think people will browse the catalog online like they
| did it with the book.
|
| When another app is just a flick away, people will jump off
| much more quickly than with a book.
|
| I know I will.
| ToFab123 wrote:
| I don't know what it ended up becoming as I have not used
| IKEA online since long time, but I remember that the mantra
| back then was, that they wanted the assembling manual put
| online (how to put your IKEA furniture together). Back then,
| 20 some years ago, it was their key mission to provide an
| easy help with putting the furniture together. They did
| realize very early on that an online catalogue must be more
| that just a page with pretty pictures. They wanted to create
| a universe for each individual product and make it very easy
| for you to figure out how to put the furniture together. I
| remember dedicated workshops where we talked about Virtual
| Reality Headsets, 20 years ago as a tool to help people
| assembly the IKEA product. Their wet dream was that you pick
| up a box at your local IKEA store, put on your headset and
| then you will be guided _for dummies_ through the assembly
| process. This is 20 years ago.
|
| Today, every time I hear about Microsoft HoloLens I think
| about these IKEA workshops. The mission for Microsoft
| HoloLens and the IKEA catalogue is in total alignment.
| Everything Microsoft wants to do with their headset, IKEA
| wanted to do with the catalogue 20 years ago. I am confident
| that there is an Microsoft HoloLens/IKEA working group out
| there somewhere prototyping this exact thing. Microsoft
| HoloLens and IKEA catalogue is a very cool combination.
| rchaud wrote:
| I would love to have something like VR-assisted assembly
| for household, car or computer repairs. I think IKEA has
| attempted to design their stuff so that it doesn't require
| that level of guidance for the most part.
| konschubert wrote:
| I can tell you that the last thing I want to do when
| assembling an ikea shelf is to keep unlocking my phone :)
|
| I've been trying to use the website because I miss going to
| ikea and let me tell you... it's bland like amazon.com but
| much less usable...
| Gravityloss wrote:
| I find paper catalogues really impractical because it's slow to
| flip the pages and search is also slower (often you have to go
| the directory at the end). Ikea's web page is okay, better than
| the competition.
|
| Availability is a problem for Ikea currently - but at least they
| have a lot of volume and a really ruthlessly culled assortment.
| So usually they're a lot better than the competition. Almost
| everything is available for taking with you when you're at the
| store. I bet if you're doing design work for Ikea, it goes
| through a lot of checking before it will be produced.
|
| Their personnel is absolutely great, I have really good
| experience of that.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Good riddance, in my opinion. 40 million copies of a thick
| catalog with glossy pages means a couple shittons of not just
| trees but petroleum and petrochemicals for production,
| distribution, and disposal. Every year! And ten years ago, it was
| nearly 200. https://archive.is/rHAhG
|
| Can you even imagine a stack of one million catalogs?
|
| That's space, trees, plants, mammals, birds, insects, mushrooms,
| ... all being squeezed for a glossy catalog, most of which will
| get thumbed through once or twice and sent to the landfill to
| rot.
|
| These catalogs do not biodegrade well, by the way, because
| they're not just paper.
|
| I love paper books, and I enjoyed browsing this catalog just like
| many others in this thread, and yet I don't think I will miss
| this one. Hopefully, other thick glossy catalogs will follow
| suit.
|
| Production of catalogs like this squeezes our biome, and if we
| don't turn back, it will pop, and we'll be left with only enough
| resources for a small fraction of us to survive.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| You're arguing with emotions but no objectivity.
|
| Did you miss the memo where hordes of people drive their trucks
| to IKEA and buy furniture that's designed to be affordable by
| the middle class, costs an enormous amount of energy to produce
| and recycle and has a huge carbon footprint?
|
| But never mind those things, catalog is paper so it makes it
| easy to market your argument to tree huggers.
|
| The gas consumption alone to drive to IKEA dwarfs the energy
| required to make and print catalogs.
|
| Just don't go to IKEA and next time they won't print as many!
| Problem solved. And you'll save gas too.
|
| IKEA catalogs are culture. It's like saying let's close down
| the Louvre museum because it's consuming too much energy and
| inviting people to travel to Paris wasting more energy.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I commented to get the thought process started.
|
| The furniture and its procurement is only the next logical
| step in the conversation.
|
| Thinking and talking about this stuff is how I myself went
| from buying Ikea furniture to no longer doing so.
|
| I think that without having these kinds of conversations and
| perpetuating them we have little hope.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I'm with you. We should all strive to stop waste and do our
| part.
|
| I don't shop at IKEA for similar reasons and I have also
| cut down Amazon purchases for random things that I can do
| without.
|
| I think I was being too harsh, but I am sad that the
| catalogs are going away. They're such a big part of IKEA's
| contribution to culture that it's carbon footprint can be
| forgiven.
| hef19898 wrote:
| There is a ton of misconceptions out there about paper. Not
| saying using less isn't a good thing, so.
|
| Most paper uses a very decent amount of recycled paper, has ti
| actually. To the point the industry faced issues last Q1 when
| demand went down and there wasn't enough recycled paper on the
| market. Trees are grown explicitly for paper production, and
| are regrown in the same forests. Net forest losses are mainly
| due to farming, e.g. in the Amazon region. Energy wise, paper
| production offers great opportunities to balance the grid.
|
| Most paper, at least in Europe, is actually recycled.
|
| And electronics do have there issues as well. They consume raw
| earthes, are consumed as well, end up in land fills and also
| have quite extensive supply chains and CO2 foot prints. And
| they consume electricity, which has to produced. And we are
| nowhere near the necessary levels of renewables.
|
| I do support getting rid of useless paper consumption, it just
| not as straight forward as it seems.
| pvarangot wrote:
| Calling the place were they grow trees for paper a forest is
| an exercise in grammatical pedantry at least. The flora and
| fauna in those places is not similar to a real forest at all.
|
| I some cases they don't even provide the same amount of
| carbon capture because of all the energy spent on irrigation
| that wouldn't be necessary without the groundwork they do to
| make harvesting the trees easier.
|
| Yeah more paper doesn't equal less trees, but it does equal
| less forests because you can't grow a real forest if you are
| constantly irrigating and harvesting trees.
| latch wrote:
| How much energy and water goes into recycling? Collecting,
| sorting, processing?
|
| Trees grown explicitly for paper still require energy to
| plant, manage, cut and still represents a habitat loss.
| Europe has absolutely obliterated its forests. Anything that
| isn't a net gain is a major issue at this point.
| qw wrote:
| Please don't use "Europe" when comparing unless it applies
| to all 50 countries.
|
| Norway has actually increased the number of trees in the
| last 100 years.
|
| In 1925 the volume of Norway's forests was 300 million
| cubic meters of wood. Today it adds up to 900 million cubic
| meters.
|
| Source: https://sciencenorway.no/enviroment-forest-
| forskningno/norwe...
| hef19898 wrote:
| Not to forget, trees used in paper store a lot of CO2,
| CO2 that is not released until said paper is ultimately
| burned. Which takes a while.
|
| As wth everything, hyper industrialisation didn't do
| anything good. Sustainability used to be a hallmark of
| forestry. If we could just go back to that, and adopt it
| to maximize CO2 capture, it would be great. As would be
| going back to pre-industrial animal farming, better for
| the animals, better for the environment, better for the
| farmers and better meat.
| vinay427 wrote:
| > Please don't use "Europe" when comparing unless it
| applies to all 50 countries.
|
| As someone who lives in a smaller European country, I can
| empathize. At least on HN, it seems like both Europeans
| (in the regional sense) and non-Europeans are guilty of
| this. However, while the parent claim may or may not be
| accurate in this case, I think the use of "Europe" can
| reasonably be interpreted as referring to the region in
| aggregate, just as North America or Oceania might be
| used.
|
| My larger problem with the parent and GP comments is that
| they both make specific claims about "Europe" that aren't
| self-evident without any citations.
| latch wrote:
| That seems a bit unfair since I was replying to someone
| that was making positive generalization about Europe.
|
| Also, at the risk of moving the goalpost, having more
| trees than some arbitrary point in time isn't
| particularly reassuring. In central Europe, at least,
| 1925 would have been near an all-time low. The
| deforestation in central and northern Europe has been
| going on for millennia
| (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-18646-7)
| illwrks wrote:
| My understanding is that the recycling of paper is still
| quite an intensive chemical process requiring lots of water,
| bleaching chemicals etc.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| Silviculture is an interesting subject, and while you're
| right that a lot of pulpwood is sourced from timber
| plantations, that isn't entirely benign. It is an an
| agricultural process and many use fertilizers (haber-bosch
| process, natural gas inputs), insecticides, and fungicides.
| On the production end, the modern kraft process plant still
| produces air and water pollution.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Well, that covers the paper, for the most part. Thanks for
| explaining that.
|
| Now, let's talk about the other components:
|
| the ink (petrochemicals, for the most part)
|
| the production, transportation, and containers for the ink
|
| the runoff into our biosphere from the ink production
|
| the transportation of the paper to the printing facility
|
| the binding (glue)
|
| the transportation of the catalogs to the stores
|
| the plastic wrap and other packaging for the catalogs
|
| the labor put into it (perhaps those people could be paid to
| rest instead? probably better for everyone all-around)
|
| Did I miss anything?
|
| How many dead, displaced, or injured animals do you think
| that is per catalog? How many humans harmed by exposure to
| manufactured poison? How many gallons of diesel extracted,
| transported, refined, transported again, and burned? How many
| dozen pieces of trucks, trains, and container ships mined,
| produced, and worn down? Is it still better than viewing the
| same catalogs online on an already existing computer screen?
|
| Every single artefact produced by our system has a similar
| footprint. It's not just money cost. And I think it's worth
| considering.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| You are talking about books in general right?
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Well, yes, although glossy pages create some extra
| impact.
|
| However, if the book in question is one which will be
| kept for a while, actually read or referred to, perhaps
| it is a more worthwhile endeavor?
|
| Compare that to the other end of the spectrum, e.g.
| supermarket ads, most of which do not even leave the
| plastic bag which carries them into someone's front yard
| and straight into the trash.
| lhorie wrote:
| That's not really an argument against paper catalogs
| specifically, it looks more like an argument against
| consumerism in general.
|
| But taken to the logical conclusion, that argument can look
| rather hypocritical, for example why is the discussion
| about paper vs electronic catalogs for buying furniture and
| not about why we even need beds and chairs to begin with,
| while people in japan are fine w/ futons[0] and kotatsu[1]?
|
| One can take the argument to extremes and argue that
| amazonian forests burning in Brazil are partly due to you
| and I existing and needing to eat and wanting to have kids
| who need to be fed.
|
| It's clearly a slippery slope, and if one draws the moral
| line to make others bad, while conveniently claiming to be
| "kosher" themselves, that's not really a convincing line.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futon
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotatsu
| lolcowz wrote:
| I think your argument is the one falling down the
| slippery slope. How does considering protecting the
| environment to be good inevitably lead to arguments
| against both our existences when a line can be clearly
| drawn at the point where protection is advocated only so
| far as to maximize humanity's survival? This extreme is
| so clearly on the opposite side of that line compared to
| eradicating paper catalogs which honestly isn't going to
| kill anyone or stop us from "feeding our kids".
| lhorie wrote:
| I'm not saying one necessarily implies the other. That
| was reductio ad absurdum precisely to demonstrate that
| any argument of this type, no matter how sensible or
| true, can be considered dismissible by _someone_.
|
| I'm speaking to the idea of in-groups vs out-groups. For
| example, think about veganism and how their activism
| generally falls on deaf ears outside of their own
| circles. Bringing supply chain arguments to this
| discussion is very similar in the sense that they are
| strictly true but easily dismissible by someone who
| doesn't share the same set of values/priorities.
|
| The line of argument might potentially even be self-
| defeating, for example, if the takeaway is that
| electronic catalogs > paper catalogs, never mind the rare
| earth mines and sweatshops in china and that drawers in
| ikea furniture still invite further consumerism. That's a
| very very different takeaway than "geez I should buy less
| stuff".
| lolcowz wrote:
| I'm not fluent in this logic lingo, but I don't think
| there's a point in pointing out that someone might
| believe in the absurd if its, well, absurd. Yes, surely
| there are crazy people who will jump down every slippery
| slope to misinterpret the very simple proposition that
| something, all things considered and along the line I
| have stated before, makes the world better, by taking it
| to the absurd, but I don't think arguing on this person's
| behalf like you are doing is particularly worthwhile if
| you even acknowledge that the slippery slope is absurd.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Anything taken to an extreme becomes absurd, sure. You're
| right that my argument is not just against paper
| catalogs, but against consumerism in general.
|
| However, my aim is not to take it to the extreme, nor to
| suggest that we shouldn't eat. It's merely to introduce a
| measure of "seventh generation" thinking and
| consideration into buying habits, beyond the amount of
| funds it takes to procure something.
|
| If I take it further than sounds comfortable to you in my
| own life, it is only show what is possible, and to shift
| the needle of normal a little bit towards the direction
| of prudence and restraint.
|
| Do we still need food? Of course! Do we need a place to
| sleep comfortably? Of course we do, and I do not suggest
| othrwise.
|
| But what about new clothes when we already have quite a
| few sets which are still good, or a new pair of shoes
| when we still have a couple which are just a bit scuffed?
|
| My argument is to consider the full systemic impact of
| buying those items, something no one else will do for us,
| before going through with it. If you consider this idea
| next time you are about to buy something, that each
| {dollar} spent comes back around in so many ways to harm
| us and our close relatives on the biological tree of
| live, then I will consider my writing a success.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| Neither futon nor kotatsu add any vertical space to the
| room as opposed to having a bed or a table with drawers
| underneath
| lhorie wrote:
| In the context of this discussion (i.e. the suggestion
| that consumerism is bad from an environmental impact
| perspective), that'd actually qualify as a feature of
| futons/kotatsu.
| astrange wrote:
| Kotatsu does add some space to the room, since it's a
| table - you keep your legs under it and now you can put
| stuff on top.
| markandrewj wrote:
| Pulp production.
| AngryData wrote:
| You are right, but it would be possible to produce like 99%
| of that from trees, if we bothered to spend to effort. You
| can distill trees into petroleum products, however doing so
| breaks the illusion of how much organic material we are
| burning through with just a single gallon of fuel or oil.
| Rather than thinking "its just a single gallon of gas" it
| turns into "well that as at least like 3-4 trees worth of
| fuel."
| einpoklum wrote:
| But are you sure this is not all dwarfed by the overall
| quantities and volumes which IKEA produces, transports and
| sells? i.e. the furniture, decorations, fittings, textiles
| etc. ?
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| You're right, of course. The catalog is dwarved by all
| the other products that come out of Ikea. I personally
| don't partake in buying them for 10+ years now, because I
| think about the stuff above. Plenty of furniture I can
| get without pulling on that supply chain.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Possibly true, but so what? Every little bit helps and
| this seems like an easy win, ecologically speaking.
|
| I hate to think how much junk mail I receive every year.
| We use a 14 gallon recycling bin and it's about half full
| of waste paper mail EVERY WEEK in the USA. Catalogs,
| flyers, credit card offers, loan offers, etc. It's
| disgusting and I can't opt out.
| AngryData wrote:
| I agree, but to me it is still like holding a cup over
| your head while it is raining outside and functionally
| does almost nothing except spread the fake idea that we
| are actually turning society green. Paper in general is
| probably one of the least things we should be worried
| about because it is one of the easiest things to farm and
| uses minimal input compared to the bulk of material it
| produces.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| What should we be concerned with even more, in your
| opinion?
|
| And how would someone who spends money reduce their
| complicity?
| einpoklum wrote:
| > Every little bit helps and this seems like an easy win,
| ecologically speaking.
|
| It is likely not helpful if IKEA gets to enjoy the image
| of an environmentally-friendly eneterprise based on a
| token gesture. Many companies engage in such gestures to
| get themselves off the hook for their involvement in
| problematic practices.
|
| I'm not saying that it's IKEA's fault that people buy
| throw-away furniture, or that the population is growing
| etc, but still.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Yep. Same for Apple: "We're leaving out the charger for
| your $1000 phone. It's for the environment, we promise."
|
| But, I'll take any environment win I can get at this
| point.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Precisely, never mind the hundreds of kitchen gadgets
| they own and the fact that they drove to IKEA in a big
| truck to buy cheap furniture.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I don't own, nor purchase any kitchen gadgets, nor do I
| drive a truck, nor do I buy furniture.
| fullstop wrote:
| They are very good at minimizing packaging. Also, my kids
| use my IKEA dresser that I had when I was younger, bought
| in 1989. I had to replace the rails and a few of the
| knobs, but it's still in fantastic shape even after going
| through several changes of residence.
|
| Just throwing this out there -- it's not like all of this
| stuff is ending in the trash. This dresser is over 30
| years old now.
| DanBC wrote:
| > Did I miss anything?
|
| You missed coatings, which can include minerals or
| plastics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coated_paper
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Thanks for this, I forgot.
|
| One of the reasons they do not degrade well.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Transportation has propably the highest negative impact,
| paper is aheavy bulk product after all. Animal impact, i
| would say comparativley low. We are talking about decades
| old economic forests here (there are of course exception
| which should be prosecuted to the fullest where ever
| possible). In Europa at least, these activities are not
| having any more negative impact on wild life. Again, these
| are not age old natural forestsanymore and haven't been for
| quite a while.
|
| I am not saying pushing the catalogue to digital is a net
| negative, no idea how that could even be reliably
| quantified. Just that paper and print production is by no
| means as negative to the environment as is believed.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| are you saying there are no beings who live in those
| woods and are displace?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| In a commercial wood farm? Not really, no. That's a big
| problem with them - they're dead apart from the trees
| being farmed.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| (Seeing Like A State, etc)
| demosito666 wrote:
| I think it's safe to say that there is no wildlife in
| Europe, so this is more or less correct.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Are you sure about that? This page suggests otherwise:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fauna_of_Europe
| qayxc wrote:
| > I think it's safe to say that there is no wildlife in
| Europe, so this is more or less correct.
|
| You don't go out too much, do you? In my municipality we
| have wolves - at a population density of 214 ppl/km2 no
| less. Since there's no recorded killings of livestock by
| wolves and they have to eat something, it's save to
| assume we're OK on boars and deer, too. Not to mention
| the rabbits, hares, badgers, various songbirds, birds of
| prey, insects and other critters I encounter on a daily
| basis when walking the dog. Through the local woods.
| Which are very much filled with wildlife.
|
| edit: I got the population density wrong - it's actually
| much lower if the entire area is considered, not just the
| town :) the correct figure including all land would be
| ~45 ppl/km2.
| danielbarla wrote:
| I generally agree with your direction. That said, this is
| incredibly hard to quantify (and also: [1]); because
| wildlife is not uniformly negatively affected in a clear-
| cut area. Any "artificial" intervention by humans will
| favour some animals and harm others. Ignoring the fact
| that it was probably humans who first cleared out
| primordial forests, the very act of re-planting a forest
| probably negatively impacted those species who don't
| thrive in a forest setting.
|
| I'd say having such forests which are relatively
| unmolested for several years before being harvested are
| less negative than clearing them out and placing say
| farms in their place. So, overall it's not the biggest
| thing to go after, but then, I'm no expert.
|
| [1] also depends greatly on what type of cutting we're
| talking about. I would say it's clear that illegal and /
| or legal but permanent deforestation is a negative.
| Above, I'm talking about forests which are planted and
| re-planted to obtain their wood.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| good points.
| varjag wrote:
| How do you think?
|
| https://e360.yale.edu/assets/site/_1260x709_crop_center-
| cent...
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| looks cozy. i'd live in there. :)
| varjag wrote:
| So guess the animals would too... if you had them food
| brought in. Not much undergrowth to feed off.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Where there's soil undisturbed, there are insects. Where
| there are insects, there are larger creatures. Of course,
| undergrowth would help.
| jacquesm wrote:
| energy
| zests wrote:
| Now do computers and computer screens.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| This is why I have not bought a new computer in 10+
| years, and have only used hand-me-downs for the last 8,
| with a similar track record on mobile devices.
| lupire wrote:
| That 10 yr old computer can browse a catalog.
| criddell wrote:
| Why? I'm going to have my computer anyway. Moving the
| catalog to 100% digital is a win.
| [deleted]
| hinkley wrote:
| "Logging forests," "working forests" are not forests. They're
| tree farms. Calling them forests evokes a bunch of
| assumptions about conservation that are mostly not true about
| forestry trees.
|
| We have a great deal of logging going on in temperate
| rainforests and there are whole swaths of the food chain that
| require moss growing on old growth trees. Clearcutting kills
| all of this. So does leaving a few trees intact, which is
| seen as some sort of improvement to conservation. It is not.
| Everything dies, it just dies slower. Most of the flora and
| fauna are adapted to full forest cover and high humidity. A
| copse of trees does not provide any of this. Summer comes and
| everything dries out.
|
| We are still in need of a very different process for creating
| paper products. Fishing exclusion zones are an interesting
| model, but fish can move a lot farther than ferns, and a hell
| of a lot farther than moss and the habitat they provide. We
| may end up having to leaving a considerable amount of land
| intact (larger blocks, closer to everywhere) to avoid tree
| farm situations.
| galfarragem wrote:
| This may be the most demagogic HN comment I've read in years.
|
| > 40 million copies of a thick catalog with glossy pages means
| a couple shittons of not just trees but petroleum and
| petrochemicals for production, distribution, and disposal.
| Every year!
|
| - What about about _daily_ printed newspapers?
|
| - What about shop brochures that we receive _weekly_ in the
| mailbox?
|
| - What about toilet paper and derivates?
|
| I can't understand people congratulating the discontinuation of
| an _yearly_ book (arguably an historic document) instead of
| focusing one order of magnitude higher.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Well, we won't get rid of them all at once... But don't you
| think it would be a good idea?
|
| For what it's worth, I don't use toilet paper for its
| intended purpose, and I bet my butt is way cleaner than yours
| if you do. :)
|
| I'm not sure why you are so critical of applauding one good
| thing just because other bad things are still in place.
| iso1631 wrote:
| How do you blow your nose?
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| The same way it's been done for millennia before, into a
| cloth or into my hand which I then wash.
| briandear wrote:
| It must be exhausting to be so much better than the rest
| of us.
|
| I never understood the idea of privation being considered
| progressive. It isn't progress to set the thermostat to a
| more uncomfortable temperature in order to save energy.
| It isn't progress to have massive grid outages because
| windmills froze -- windmills that are sitting atop many
| lifetimes of oil and natural gas reserves. It isn't
| progress to freeze today because someone is theorizing
| that Tuvalu is on the cusp of sinking. Yet Tuvalu is
| growing in size instead of sinking but our policies still
| feature Chicken Little fear-mongering as a tool of
| control.
|
| Sitting in a frozen-windmill-induced blackout in sub
| freezing temperatures for day two in Houston of all
| places makes me extremely irritated that the reason we
| have a blackout is because the hysterical anti-carbon
| crowd is afraid of a catastrophe that we've been promised
| since Al Gore's inaccurate film. [1] A "catastrophe"
| being used in a similar vein as the war in Eastasia. Or
| was it Eurasia? Kind of hard to remember now given that
| new printed books are being replaced by digital because
| forgotmypw17 is worried about the carbon footprint of
| ink.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| > It must be exhausting to be so much better than the
| rest of us.
|
| I don't recall claiming such a thing. I'm sharing what I
| do and why, and if anyone wants to use my knowledge
| they're welcome to.
|
| Sorry about the blackout, and any role I have
| inadvertently played in it.
|
| No offense, there are many places around the world where
| blackouts are a regular everyday (or even every day)
| occurrence. Perhaps, you can give them a thought in an
| idle moment.
| Djvacto wrote:
| > In truth, virtually all forms of power generation in
| Texas suffered outages during the cold snap, with early
| reports showing gas plants sustaining the most failures,
| Webber said. Early Monday morning, ERCOT issued a news
| release saying generation "across fuel types" had gone
| offline, amid reports of wind turbines covered in ice and
| natural gas wellheads freezing up.
|
| https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/
| Tex...
|
| This is just the first source I found on google to quote,
| but if houstonchronicle isn't a trustworthy news source
| let me know. It seems like all forms of energy suffered
| from a lack of winterization. To me, it seems the issue
| is not that renewable energy was depended upon, but
| rather that the whole system was unprepared for a cold
| snap like this.
|
| > But the vast majority of energy the state generates is
| through natural gas. In October 2020, the U.S. Energy
| Information Administration reported that renewables
| generated 22% of the state's energy, while gas generated
| 51.8%.19 hours ago
|
| https://www.kxan.com/news/texas/are-frozen-wind-turbines-
| to-...
| burkaman wrote:
| > ERCOT said Tuesday that of the 45,000 total megawatts
| of power that were offline statewide, about 30,000
| consisted of thermal sources -- gas, coal and nuclear
| plants -- and 16,000 came from renewable sources.
|
| - https://www.chron.com/news/article/Texas-blackouts-
| fuel-fals...
| pessimizer wrote:
| I don't understand the reasoning behind defending someone who
| kills six people by mentioning three people who killed ten.
| Do you seriously think the person you've replied to is happy
| about daily printed newspapers, junkmail, and wasted toilet
| paper?
| mcv wrote:
| Not that person, but I do enjoy reading my newspaper from
| paper.
|
| But I recently decided to switch to digital. The paper
| keeps piling up, and I increasingly find myself reading the
| news on their app.
| galfarragem wrote:
| I believe the fair proportion is 3 people that killed 100
| people each running free while we congratulate the police
| for jailing the guy who insulted us.
| rrrazdan wrote:
| What about them?
| kristofferR wrote:
| At least in Norway we have stickers we can put on our
| mailboxes that makes it illegal to add mail spam to them.
|
| Pretty simple solution, should be standard everywhere.
| S53Vflnr4n wrote:
| Shouldn't we more worried about using toilet paper than IKEA
| catalog if we want to save trees ? Using a bidet is very easy
| and clean.
|
| https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2010/04/16/toilet-paper-...
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| It's true, and a bidet proper isn't necessarily needed.
|
| I haven't used an actual bidet in a while, but I honestly
| find it hard to fathom not washing my butt after pooping now
| that I've started doing it.
|
| TP is just smearing it around...
| fredsir wrote:
| Can you explain how you wash your butt afterwards? Do you
| take a shower? Sit in the sink and rinse with soap?
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| It depends on the circumstances. I may get into the
| shower or I may hang my butt over the tub or sink.
|
| The basic method is to keep washing it and rinsing it off
| and then washing off my hand, until I no longer feel poop
| or anything resembling it on my butt. Be gentle. No soap
| on the butt, that will dry it out. (As I mentioned in
| other posts, I don't use soap anywhere besides my hands.)
|
| I then keep washing it, occasionally washing off my hand.
| When I can rub my butt with my hand it comes back not
| smelling like poop at all, I consider my butt to be
| clean.
|
| If you look at animals, they do something similar, though
| they have to lick it clean. I consider myself very
| fortunate and blessed to not have to do that. :)
|
| Afterwards, I wash my hands, get dressed, and then wash
| my hands again.
| AngryData wrote:
| If you are just smearing it around then I think you have
| both a diet and a method problem.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Here is a challenge for you:
|
| After you're done wiping as thoroughly as you will, run
| your hand or another piece of toilet paper through your
| butt and smell it.
| ngngngng wrote:
| "The OPA man, Anderson Dawes, was sitting on a cloth folding
| chair outside Miller's hole, reading a book. It was a real book
| --onionskin pages bound in what might have been actual leather.
| Miller had seen pictures of them before; the idea of that much
| weight for a single megabyte of data struck him as decadent."
|
| - Leviathan Wakes, James S. A. Corey
| alvarlagerlof wrote:
| I've been watching the series and haven't heard that quote.
| Might just have to read the books now.
| ngngngng wrote:
| I started with the series as well, after the previous
| season ended I became desperate to continue the story so I
| started reading them. They did such a good job with the
| series but the books were so good already.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Great quote, thanks for posting it.
|
| Books are not just decadent, they're also a reliable store of
| information which cannot be erased or altered easily without
| our knowledge.
|
| There's immense and irreplaceable value in paper books, and
| I've taken to collecting the best ones.
|
| I just don't think there's much value in this particular one.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| Books (especially used ones) are also generally cheaper
| than digital copies.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Most paper books don't last. Paperbacks are printed on
| cheap acidic paper that yellows and eventually starts to
| crumble. The glue in the spine dries and cracks.
|
| Hardbacks are more likely to last, and premium heirloom
| hardbacks = special print runs with special materials and
| extra assembly effort - are most likely to survive.
|
| But for what? Most heirloom hardbacks are better-than-
| average novels for well-heeled fans and collectors, not a
| complete guide to rebuilding civilisation.
|
| I'd be all for an apocalypse-beating Self-Study Handbook of
| The Important Stuff We Worked Out and Did, but good luck
| finding a publisher to fund what would be a massive
| project.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Some of the most valuable books have more to do with the
| inner world than the outer.
|
| Other than binding, which can be re-done pretty easily,
| paperbacks are readable after 50-100 years.
|
| The paper may yellow, but crumbling takes a bit longer.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| You may have been unusually lucky. I barely dare open
| some of the paperbacks I bought in the 70s and 80s.
|
| Although I have PDFs of all of them, so it doesn't
| matter. The fact that I can change the font size to make
| them legible now does, to me at least.
|
| The hardbacks are still fine. (Except for the print
| size.)
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| I have several paperbacks that are getting close to their
| centenary. They are getting slightly fragile but that is
| a long way from saying that the content is unusable.
|
| And I have several books published in the nineteen
| thirties and forties that would serve well to reboot
| civilization having comprehensive instructions for
| building all sorts of necessary machinery, buildings,
| clothes, etc. There were many such books with titles such
| as "Everything Within" and "The Handyman's Complete Self-
| Instructor".
|
| There is no need for a publisher to fund a massive
| project; most of what is needed is already available on
| paper and increasing amounts of it have been scanned so
| that anyone with a laser printer can make their own
| permanent copy.
|
| Of course those 1930s and 40s books won't tell you how to
| build a modern computer but they do tell you how to build
| a radio without needing to build a chip fab first.
|
| And it seems that there is sufficient interest
| (presumably as conversation pieces) for some such books
| to be republished: https://bookshop.org/books/the-
| handyman-s-complete-self-inst...
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| 100%. My half-kidding "end of the world/zombie
| apocalypse" plan was always to pile some food into
| Robarts Library (Toronto) and gather the books I'd need
| to make it.
|
| 1) Endless knowledge
|
| 2) It's a bloody fortress
|
| Kidding aside, though, and also being one that maintains
| a small library I have to agree. Most of them are not so
| cheap as to actively degrade so fundamentally as to be
| unreadable. Maybe old dime-store dramas. I mean, unless
| you've left them open in the sunlight for 50 years.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Sadly as radio goes the way of tv and switches to HD over
| time, I fear the analog equivalents that you can somewhat
| easily tune with a simple circuit may not still be around
| in 20, 30, 40 years.
| mc32 wrote:
| Henry Stephens Book of the Farm from the 1800s can still
| be useful today, for example.
| timgl wrote:
| You're in luck, someone already has [0]
|
| [0] "The Knowledge" by Lewis Dartnell
| ardy42 wrote:
| > But for what? Most heirloom hardbacks are better-than-
| average novels for well-heeled fans and collectors, not a
| complete guide to rebuilding civilisation.
|
| They're not a guide for rebuilding civilization. They're
| something that can last _through_ whatever dark time you
| 're considering in some semi-forgotten corner, so the
| _next_ civilization can learn about and study what came
| before. And honestly, they don 't need to last the whole
| time, but rather only until thins recover enough that you
| start to have copyists, etc.
| yardie wrote:
| We assume books are permanent because we've always had
| them. But in medieval times books weren't permanent. We
| only have the knowledge that we do now because monasteries
| had a dedicated team of monks who constantly copied and
| rewrote books onto new parchment.
| bluGill wrote:
| True, good modern paper of the types those monk used
| lasts about 500 years or so in the typical case. (meaning
| no fire-flood, both of which were common; and not in a
| carefully climate controlled area which can add thousands
| of years). We haven't really improved on paper since
| then. There is a lot of cheap paper that will fall apart
| in less than 100 years, but those monks didn't use that.
|
| What digital storage do you have that will last that
| long? A few CDs would in the ideal case (but most are not
| that grade). I'm not clear how long SSDs will last.
| Magnetic tape becomes brittle and single read in about 30
| years as we know from history.
|
| The only advantage of digital is IF you care at all it is
| easy/cheap to copy to something new.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| It only seems like we've always had them because most
| people want books from this century. The further back you
| go the harder it is to find any type of book, even mass
| produced dime novels, because a lot of them have rotted
| away.
|
| If you actually want books to last a long time, they must
| be stored under controlled conditions by an actual
| archivist.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Narp, I mean some will probably end up as collector's items
| in a hundred years, as a glance into 2021 design trends -
| 100 year old advertisements and catalogs are great
| collectibles and time capsules nowadays - but at the moment
| they're more of a nice to have for the next year or so. I
| do like leafing through things like that sometimes, but at
| the same time I don't mind going to the physical store for
| a browse. More useful.
| ngngngng wrote:
| As it relates, the only reason I could find that quote to
| reply to you was because I have the book in digital format.
| I remembered the word leather, and "leather" only appears
| in Leviathan Wakes 8 times, making it easy to find.
|
| I love paper books as well, but I think the authors have
| prophetically captured the inevitable. Cutting down forests
| to only add tangibility to our bytes just isn't worth it.
| vidarh wrote:
| The quote is particularly relevant when discussing
| _space_ though. It 's specifically the weight to data
| ratio that's called out as decadent. Something that's
| more relevant if you're used to travel with severe
| constraints on weight much more often than we are.
|
| I agree that it's inevitable that things move that way -
| my only paper books in recent years have been to complete
| my collection of Ian Banks because that particular
| edition looks gorgeous, and Stalenhag's art books. I
| don't anticipate buying more paper copies of novels or
| textbooks unless there are books I can't find in digital
| version.
|
| But at the same time, I just published a scifi novel and
| was surprised at how large a proportion of sales are
| still made up by paperback (not exactly selling millions,
| so it's not exactly a large sample of the market). It
| seems like it will take a long time before paper books
| become _unusual_ to the point of being considered
| decadent.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Plenty of existing books to be found without having to
| source new ones.
|
| Many, many books are being discarded these days, so I
| don't have to buy new, or buy at all.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| Many towns' library systems do giveaways as well.
|
| My old hometown's system used to do a semi-regular
| culling at the yearly mini arts & crafts fest in the
| park. They'd lay out 5 long rows of tables and cover them
| in old books that had to be retired. You could take as
| much as you could carry for a donation of any size.
|
| I used to go when I was in my teens and had two dollars
| to rub together, and I still go back now in my 30's if
| I'm in town (with more of a donation). I've found some
| real gems.
| dsego wrote:
| Well, we're likely one strong magnetic pulse away from having
| only paper books as a source of information, so there is
| that.
| onion2k wrote:
| Electromagnetic pulses can't wipe CDs or DVDs, so we'd
| definitely still have anything stored on those, and most
| data centres are designed with EM shielding so we could
| still have data stored in the cloud unless it was a
| _massive_ pulse. I think we 'd be OK.
| Retric wrote:
| CD's and DVD's require players which are susceptible to
| EM pulses. It seems extremely unlikely for that kind of
| global EM pulse to happen, but I can't exactly say it's
| impossible.
| ryder9 wrote:
| fires destroy books, and there are more fires than EMPs
|
| more fires have destroyed entire libraries than EMPs have
| destroyed storage or digital storage reading devices
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| I'm no EM-pulsicist, but I believe an EM pulse capable of
| inducing destructive currents in conductors as relatively
| short as those you'd find in an (unplugged) CD/DVD
| player, and doing that all over the globe, such a pulse
| would have to be ridiculously, absurdly massive. Are
| there any events or things we know about that could do
| this without also, say, sterilizing the planet?
| depressedpanda wrote:
| Coronal mass ejections can cause geomagnetic storms that
| will mess with electronics globally.
|
| It happened back in 1859, but it's effects were limited
| as the only susceptible tech was telegraph systems.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event
| iso1631 wrote:
| On the other hand of all the books I'd like to save, the
| Ikea catalogue isn't top of the list.
| tutfbhuf wrote:
| > Can you even imagine a stack of one million catalogs?
|
| The stack would reach from earth to ISS multiple times.
| frankfrankfrank wrote:
| 1) What do you think IKEA furniture is made of?
|
| 2) What do you think the impact is of poorly constructed IKEA
| furniture that lasts some small fraction of time of massive
| wood furniture.
|
| If you want to go off, then go off on the fact that our
| governments support the creation of throwaway products rather
| than long lasting products.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I agree on the Ikea furniture bit, and the impact it has. The
| catalog is only the beginning.
|
| I can't do anything about what our governments support. I can
| do something about what I support and what I am complicit to.
| creddit wrote:
| > These catalogs do not biodegrade well, by the way, because
| they're not just paper.
|
| Great! A new carbon capture method that also provides utility!
| I'll take 40M please.
| ric2b wrote:
| I don't think you're saving any carbon emissions by printing
| IKEA catalogs...
| bigtones wrote:
| Tell that to Restoration Hardware (RH).
| underseacables wrote:
| The IKEA book book! https://youtu.be/MOXQo7nURs0
| Gaelan wrote:
| dang, doesn't seem like this adds much over the NPR story it
| links to: https://www.npr.org/2020/12/07/943886033/emotional-but-
| ratio...
|
| (By the way, does the keyword "dang" actually do anything to help
| summon you?)
| pgyc wrote:
| Yes, its something we introduced a while back but we don't
| actively broadcast it to avoid abuse.
| [deleted]
| wrongdonf wrote:
| I love ikea. In the 90s and naughts it was a symbol of progress
| and its products complemented the sheik style that was so popular
| at the time. And it was commonly said to be cheap, and
| contributed to a new style of ephemeral living that was the
| precursor to modern tech nomadism and living by wire so to speak.
| Fresh euro-style industrialized in American fashion. But recently
| IKEA hasn't seemed very cheap to me. And the throwing away of the
| olde ways has now progressed to a point where AGI can no longer
| be written off completely and with that comes the feeling that we
| may soon have thrown away too much.
| sxp wrote:
| I'm going to miss this catalog. I really enjoyed browsing through
| the catalog once I learned it was mostly CGI:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20170327144912/http://www.cgsocie...
| crististm wrote:
| IKEA catalog is like the "I'm feeling lucky' google button.
|
| I guess we'll see soon what it means to get rid of it.
| ed312 wrote:
| Getting rid of that button (and feature) is the ultimate "we
| prioritized metrics-based design" over any human input or craft
| canary. We love old buildings because of an innate human craft
| and attention to detail. That button, to me, represents a
| digital form of that same emotion.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| I'm certainly in favor of mitigating damage to Mother Nature. But
| this particular issue isn't that simple. Unfortunately, there are
| other nefarious force that should also be considered.
|
| Will we be able to browse the new catalogue without every scroll
| and click being tracked? For eternity?
|
| Trees are renewable. Privacy? Much less so.
| steve918 wrote:
| Somewhat unrelated IKEA has been brought to it's knees during the
| pandemic and it has made their online ordering completely
| useless. For a company shifting focus to online only I would
| think they would want to be able to ship some things purchased
| online.
|
| Stock is also low in the Portland store, but even the few items
| available can't be purchased online and shipped to me. I've tried
| to order a number of things recently and they won't ship anything
| to my house.
| justin66 wrote:
| Their online ordering was never any good. I hate to think it's
| gotten worse.
| rplnt wrote:
| It wasn't the ordering that sucked, they had very limited
| capacity at the stores to actually prepare the goods, as well
| as limited (and expensive) shipping. E.g. limiting orders per
| day - you had to order at midnight.
| brazzledazzle wrote:
| It's definitely both a trash online shopping experience as
| well as capacity issues. Considering there's a pandemic I
| can't blame them for the latter but the former deserves the
| criticism.
| madsohm wrote:
| In Denmark it's even worse than sucky shipping. Here we pay to
| collect our purchased items ourselves. So it's the items price
| plus ~$6 to collect it.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| IKEA's click and collect.
|
| It's my understanding that the extra fee pays for time not
| spent in IKEA's alley (click) and the preparation of your
| purchases (collect).
| Zigurd wrote:
| Last year I needed some bed linens. I like Ikea design, and I
| have some Ikea bed linens. My naive thought was that, surely, I
| could order bed linens online and have them delivered. No. No
| you can't. You just can't.
|
| That is astounding at a time when anyone with a free website
| whacked together in a no-code site-builder can drop in an
| e-commerce widget and have a first rate online shopping
| experience for customers, with a "cart," check-out, payment,
| etc.
|
| Even when I was willing to shop in person, Ikea's tech was a
| frustrating factor. You cannot tell if every component of a
| couch configuration you want is in stock. You can't put the
| stock on hold. All you get is a red/yellow/green indicator of
| how much stock a store has. Since a couch has several modules
| and each module has a separate stock item for base, back
| cushion, and seat cushion upholstery, the odds of getting
| everything in one trip approaches zero.
|
| I cannot think of anywhere else where a few tens of millions in
| tech development could more obviously build billions in
| enterprise value.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| As many others have commented, IKEA's online ordering has
| always been bad and so has been their service, delivery fees
| are also quite high (in the UK at least).
|
| IMHO, their focus is the in-store experience and have an online
| offering because they feel they have to but they never wanted
| to develop it too much.
|
| Even their "click and collect" service is quite bad in my
| experience (but maybe that was that particular store): It's not
| well organised in-store, the collection area looks a mess, and
| the employees are uncaring.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| Besides the fact that the items that I needed weren't in stock
| in the nearest 2 IKEA stores (which meant I had to drive 1.5
| hrs to the 3rd one), the Click & Collect pickup itself was
| pretty seamless. Just park and scan the QR code and they bring
| the cart to your car.
| Griffinsauce wrote:
| Their support systems have also fully broken down here in the
| Netherlands.
|
| Phone is not available because their people are working from
| home (this is entirely a solvable problem...), there's no email
| and the chat channels are so overwhelmed that it takes a week
| for them to respond.
|
| This is not a great experience when you received nothing and
| your delivery is marked as "delivered a week ago" in a
| completely borked status page.
| ThePadawan wrote:
| Personal anecdote, buz IKEA's online shopping has always suckes
| for me, even before 2020.
|
| - Shipping options disappear and reappear randomly when
| refreshing the shopping cart
|
| - some items just cannot be bought online for no clear reason
| (baking spatulas cannot, cooking spatulas can)
|
| - Several packages arrived completely smashed open, and
| returning them involved bringing them "back" to the nearest
| IKEA which wasn't particularly fun with 35kg of furniture and
| no car.
| arkitaip wrote:
| IKEA's online shopping even sucks in Sweden, with shipping
| being expensive or online ordering unavailable for many
| products. Honestly their rate if innovation kinda sucks
| outside their narrow field of expertise (huge furniture
| warehouses). Like, they have for decades been discussing
| offering small stores to sell everyday necessities to
| customers who can't or won't travel to their warehouses
| outside the cities, but nothing has come out of it.
| sethhochberg wrote:
| It seems like something is maybe starting to happen with
| the small city store idea - in NYC, IKEA already has a
| pretty normal-sized store in a relatively industrial area
| of Brooklyn, but recently opened an experimental small-
| format store in Queens and has a really small-format store
| in Manhattan.
| brazzledazzle wrote:
| On the US site I can't even log in and view my orders. I
| have to paste in the order number. I also noticed my "IKEA
| family" login doesn't work at the normal IKEA login page
| which makes me think it's two distinct systems with some
| kind of federation. It's bizarre and I can only imagine the
| legacy cruft and/or dysfunction that led to this.
|
| If this is how bad it looks from the outside I can only
| imagine what it's like working there.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Also, don't make the mistake of trying to call for a return.
| IKEA US had a 3+ hour long wait for the phones.
| universa1 wrote:
| the online shopping isn't the best, but then with the current
| lockdown in germany you can do click&collect and get your
| stuff in the parking garage... still kinda sad they still
| charge 10EUR extra for that (instead of 15 during normal
| times), but then it worked flawlessly and the stuff was ready
| for pickup the next day.
|
| still limited to things available in the local ikea, you can
| not mix "online" available and local available stuff...
| wojciii wrote:
| The site is horrible and their phones are not being taken
| because they have too many calls here in DK. I'm not going to
| use IKEA unless I strictly have to based on the experiences I
| had during the last few months.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > some items just cannot be bought online for no clear reason
|
| I think there's a pretty clear reason. During normal
| circumstances, those items are not sold online, because they
| specifically WANT you to go to a warehouse. If you're looking
| for a couch or a table, it doesn't matter than much, that's
| deliberate shopping. The smaller items, those lead to impulse
| purchases.
|
| Even tried going to Ikea to just get a frying pan, or a bath
| mat? You'll end up buying 10 more items, because: Hey, it's
| cheap, and the drive was 30 minutes the wrong way, might as
| well stock up.
| ThePadawan wrote:
| That doesn't explain why I can buy single coat hangers
| online, but not single spatulas.
|
| > (...) You'll end up buying 10 more items
|
| This is also sort of a meme. I have taken trips to IKEA
| maybe 30 times in my life, and I walked out of there with
| exactly what was on my shopping list (or less, because the
| items sucked or were out of stock) 95% of the time.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| You should try Spatula City!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BUDwj_mXKE&ab_channel=Mo
| vie...
| ema wrote:
| It probably depends on the person. I for one never leave
| IKEA without having bought something I hadn't even
| thought about beforehand.
| avh02 wrote:
| I feel cheated if i don't impulse buy something. :p
| matsemann wrote:
| > _Shipping options disappear and reappear randomly when
| refreshing the shopping cart_
|
| I got saved by this not long ago. Needed a fridge the next
| day after moving into a new apartment. Was prepared to spend
| the day cycling to IKEA, buy the fridge and rent a car, get
| it all the way home, deliver the car and bike back. But then
| the website borked and let me choose next day express carry
| inside for 0,- saving me the trouble of carrying the fridge
| up stairs, renting a car etc.
| avh02 wrote:
| Also anecdotal: needed some small items from there (because
| it matches what I've already got) and their click and collect
| in Berlin was super well done. You could order to pick up the
| next day.
|
| They had converted their entrance and exit "lobbies" in to a
| zone where carts of items were prepped and after they confirm
| your order they'd just roll the cart with your order out of
| the door and leave you to take it from there.
|
| Obviously you have to be prepared for heavier items, etc, but
| it was fast.
|
| That said, I had some less urgent stuff to get, and ordered
| online, took 3 weeks to even process/ship (though i knew that
| in advance)
| szszrk wrote:
| This is unfortunately true for my country as well. Online
| catalog is not on par with regular store availability. It's
| even weirded if you take into account that their delivery fees
| are very high. It's often cheaper to buy small amounts of IKEA
| goods from resellers that just go to IKEA and buy it for you,
| then ship with standard services.
|
| Does US stores also have the ability to pick items up from a
| warehouse next to their stores? Btw. how is this option also a
| paid one is beyond me.
|
| This is unfortunate as they have a really cool offer of smart
| devices (lights, remotes, battery powered blinds, etc), which
| by default are not online (can be connected with things like
| google now but it's limited to local physical gate device by
| default). It's hard to actually buy all of these in one place,
| you have to hunt.
| MrGilbert wrote:
| > Does US stores also have the ability to pick items up from
| a warehouse next to their stores? Btw. how is this option
| also a paid one is beyond me.
|
| That's because every IKEA store is it's own warehouse.
| Everything you can see is the stock. There is only a small
| part where you can store stuff. So, instead of you running
| around and picking stuff from the shelves, an employee has to
| do it. It's basically a "convenience fee", because it's more
| expensive for IKEA to collect it for you then you collecting
| it. I'm not here to judge, though...
| szszrk wrote:
| You are right that it is work that needs to be done and
| should be paid for, but some local companies offer
| transport plus assembly in the price of IKEA transport
| only.
|
| Also in Poland availability is different when I try to buy
| same thing online, check if it's present in local store, or
| order the same item to be picked up by myself from
| warehouse next to store.
|
| It's even weirder! Sometimes I order things that are
| "present in my local store" with transportation, but the
| actual transportation is made from a central warehouse in
| different part of the country. So IKEA's "availability" is
| clearly a concept very different from what client might
| think.
|
| > So, instead of you running around and picking stuff from
| the shelves, an employee has to do it.
|
| Here warehouses are usually buildings next to the actual
| store. So in either case employee has to pick it up from
| warehouse, but with "pick up from warehouse yourself"
| option they don't need to transport it to the store next
| by. I still have to pay for that extra.
|
| It's just weird.
| l33tman wrote:
| It's a bit complicated to compare the fees of a company
| like IKEA to the fees of small local companies, in that
| business sector I'm willing to guess there's a large
| fraction of non-tax-paying companies with worker unions
| non-existant etc.
|
| IKEAs online experience is glossy but horribly non-
| functional, agreed :/ Had that experience in Sweden as
| well. There is simply no way to buy something which isn't
| in stock in the local warehouse either, their support
| actually told me to "try to buy it every day".
| asdfaoeu wrote:
| Maybe those other companies are just rolling the price
| into the cost of the goods? I looked here at a competitor
| and they were both charging AUD$69 for the delivery of a
| sofa.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Ikea stores are franchises. Part of their operating model is
| that the store is the warehouse and the warehouse the store.
| That makes online commerce challenging as there is always a
| tension between the stakeholders who "owns" the sale.
|
| I went to the Ikea in Brooklyn back in November... in that
| store because of limited space they actually put up a tent in
| the parking garage for fulfillment. It just worked awkwardly.
|
| Other than that, the magic of a place like Ikea is they
| source from a global market and make it magically appear. In
| 2020/2021, the magic is broken because global supply chains
| are broken. In my own business, I have about 18 people
| working on sourcing various commodities, where as in 2019 we
| had 4 doing the same job.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Maybe a large scale logistic issue ? just sayin, some bike
| store had empty shelves due to border restrictions. Maybe IKEA
| local store have long term inventory while the website relies
| on far away central warehouse that was locked ?
| rchaud wrote:
| I'm honestly sad to hear this. The catalog had great style, and
| the layouts and framing were gorgeous. For those who haven't seen
| it, rest assured it was not a boring sales catalogue with tiny
| product images jammed into every page.
|
| It was something you could put down and pick up every once in a
| while, and have new decor ideas. It had a curated feel, which is
| another example of the human touch that will disappear with
| algorithm-generated "inspo" layouts on Pinterest, or affiliate
| link heavy blog posts from Apartment Therapy.
|
| At least they plan on keeping an archive and having a compendium
| available for purchase. I hope that doesn't turn out to be
| vaporware.
| Spivak wrote:
| Yeah, I hope they at least keep the content alive since they
| put a lot of effort into keeping up with interior decorating
| trends. I would absolutely subscribe to a magazine assembled by
| their group of editors.
| gnopgnip wrote:
| Hopefully the people that created this before can create a
| digital first solution. Ikea notably was using 100% renders for
| the products in the catalog, they could make that process
| interactive
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| What am I going to use to light the fire with now?
| timwaagh wrote:
| I don't know everything but it seems IKEA has become less
| relevant recently. Other stores often offer more options at a
| more affordable pricetag. Like you can't get a bed in other than
| standard sizes but Dutch people (and likely Swedes as well) have
| become so tall that isn't always practical. So instead I bought
| multiple beds at a local online only shop. They weren't much more
| expensive.
| agloeregrets wrote:
| Ooh, this is what I found wrong with their sofas! I don't get
| it, I'm around 6ft tall and their sofas are way too low.
| DoctorBonkus wrote:
| The article doesn't mention (or I didn't see it) how they will
| show their new products to the costumers. How will they tell us?
| The magasine was a big, bulky commercial that we happily
| subscribed to. It must've been the cheapest ad that a company has
| ever produced.
| sverhagen wrote:
| I remember in the Netherlands we were up in arms for ages about
| still getting "useless" phone books and yellow pages, despite
| putting the "no ads - no (free) magazines" stickers (which were
| popular when I lived there). When I moved to the US, thankfully
| no more phone books, but I felt very similar to the Ikea
| magazine: a waste of paper, a burden to the environment, and I
| don't understand why you think it would've been cheap? We shop
| at Ikea all the time (barring pandemics), I'd see new stuff
| _there_.
| moooo99 wrote:
| Having a bulky catalogue where your customers happily
| subscribe to is certainly a cheaper form of advertising than
| trying to invade their internet experience with products that
| _might_ interest them. Its by no means a good way to acquire
| new customers, but its /was certainly an effective and
| comparatively cheap method to make your customers returning
| customers.
|
| Nowadays, there are Smartphone apps, membership programs,
| extremely specific targeting options with online ads etc, all
| of those methods are certainly a lot cheaper than printing an
| delivering a bulky catalog.
|
| That is, if you do not care about the environmental aspects.
| sverhagen wrote:
| Wait, hang on, aren't we talking about door-to-door
| delivery? That's what I assumed it was. But sure, I
| probably gave them my address...
| [deleted]
| implying wrote:
| If you're feeling nostalgic, Archive.org does a great job
| digitizing these, and they go back to 1950.
|
| https://archive.org/details/ikea-catalogs/Ikea-1950
| 99_00 wrote:
| The article doesn't say why IKEA is ending the catalog.
|
| This is the closest they come:
|
| >Times change, however, and global companies hoping to stay
| relevant have little choice but to change with them. To that end,
| IKEA has announced that its catalog's glorious run will come to
| an end, a decision the company arrived at within the past few
| months.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Went through this at RadioShack back in 2000. Dropping the
| catalog was a huge negative.
|
| * online store made browsing a lot harder * employees used the
| catalog constantly to look up requested items. * we would turn
| away several people a day who came in asking for catalog. *
| customers loved browsing the catalog * lots of older customers
| that weren't ready to transition.
|
| Part of it was that "kiosk" were crap. So
| employees had a harder time looking items up.
| jacquesm wrote:
| And, that catalog also served as inspiration.
| tzs wrote:
| Speaking of RadioShack, here's a site [1] that has scans of the
| catalogs from 1939-2011, include the retail catalogs, the
| industrial catalogs, and the specialized catalogs.
|
| [1] https://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/index.htm
| taffronaut wrote:
| Using the IKEA and Argos (RIP 2020) catalogues, my mum was still
| able to browse for furniture and household stuff independently at
| the age of 92. She doesn't have broadband or any digital device;
| she's also deaf and doesn't have much manual dexterity. It now
| adds shopping to the long list of interactions such as public
| services, banking, healthcare, that she now has to do by proxy.
| Print, post (and even payphones) provided universal access to
| services for her generation where a one-off transaction cost
| pennies and required no contract, no device, not even a bank
| account (via postal order).
| ngngngng wrote:
| I am genuinely upset about this. I have such fond memories of
| thumbing through endlessly as a teenager and dreaming of having
| my own spaces that were so wonderfully busy and eclectic. My wife
| and I were just at IKEA last week picking up a new bed for our
| growing toddler, I glanced at the catalogs as we passed and
| decided against picking one up. I hope I can still get my hands
| on a couple old copies to keep on my bookshelf.
|
| Edit: Just placed an order for the specific catalog year I have
| so many memories of reading. One of my sillier purchases, but it
| feels like a piece of personal history.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I bet the cover and all the pages are shipped in a flat pack,
| and you have to bind them yourself with the included binders
| and binding tool.
| Akronymus wrote:
| The flat packages from ikea are so amazing to me. Pretty sure
| no other furniture company has any that are nearly as
| compact.
| lupire wrote:
| All low-end assemble-yourself furniture (like Office Depot)
| is flat packed.
| Akronymus wrote:
| > like Office Depot
|
| Which doesn't exist here. Guess I should've specified
| austria before.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Instructions unclear, every page is upside down!
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| That's just silly. You screw the pages into the spine with a
| little allen key they give you.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Hopefully they don't use VeloBind 11 prong binding strips,
| but then only include 10 prongs.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VeloBind
|
| >It is possible to take a soft covered Velo-bound book,
| remove the old binding and cover, and re-bind it with a
| hard cover, which may be pre-embossed for more a more
| impressive appearance. This rapid up-grade was the cause of
| the short-lived motto "Soft to hard in 30 seconds!" That
| was first done when the firm was located in Sunnyvale,
| California.
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| I went and bought one of these allen keys to disassemble a
| well worn piece of Ikea furniture, only to unzip the back
| of the chair during disassembly, to find the allen wrench.
|
| Spent a good half hour looking for the manual online, only
| to remember Ikea manuals are all pictures. I found the
| manual and was reminded of this. About to give up, I took a
| risk, and thankfully bought the right sized key. Allen
| wrenches are made in both Imperial and Metric scales; Ikea,
| being Swedish, meant correctly picking metric.
|
| I later looked through the manual, and on the 2nd to last
| page, it documented the correct key size.
| retSava wrote:
| > Edit: Just placed an order for the specific catalog year I
| have so many memories of reading. One of my sillier purchases,
| but it feels like a piece of personal history.
|
| He. I had a bout where I spent waaaaay too much time and effort
| hunting down the precise same variant of the Risk board game
| that I had as a kid, only to not play it once since I got it.
| The old edition I looked for had star-shaped playthings instead
| of the symbolic cannons etc that are used now.
|
| Now I just have to find Drakborgen (re-release of the 1985
| edition kickstarter here, apparently :) : [0]) and Battle cars
| [1].
|
| [0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fandrake/drakborgen
| [1] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2368/battlecars
| heterodyning wrote:
| I am upset too
| rospaya wrote:
| I'm not anywhere near upset but I loved going through IKEA and
| Sony catalogs in the 90s. It was aspirational since the nearest
| IKEA was two countries away and represented something modern
| and more progressive than the furniture we could buy. Most of
| the Sony catalog was equipment I didn't need or could afford,
| except Walkmans or various headphones.
|
| It's just nostalgia and consumerism I guess.
| paxys wrote:
| Why are you upset with their decision if you yourself (a self
| described fan of them) didn't bother to pick one up?
| Dirlewanger wrote:
| Seriously. Reminds me of those local news segments of old
| restaurants closing down and everyone being interviewed are
| sad and are reminiscing about when they used to go to it "as
| a kid".
| m463 wrote:
| I think they're giving up the long game.
|
| maybe kids now are doing it online?
| Tomte wrote:
| I am generally familiar with IKEA's offerings, but I have a
| hard time finding anything in the app. On the web site it's
| nearly impossible.
|
| Unless you know the name, then search works (as long as
| you're willing to scroll through 150 totally different items
| with that name).
| aequitas wrote:
| I found for a lot of websites that Google image search
| works a lot better and quicker to find what you are looking
| for then the site's own search page.
| kristofferR wrote:
| Not for IKEA, they cancel products all the time.
| Discovering an IKEA product you really want and then
| discovering that it's not available anymore is a really
| shitty feeling.
| schrijver wrote:
| Slightly shitty feeling? Anyway, the popularity of IKEA
| makes it that you can search second hand websites by the
| name of the furniture and have a decent chance of finding
| it. Would be surprised though if IKEA has a higher
| turnover of furniture models than other shops because
| selling furniture depends on creating & following trends
| & fashions and that's the same for any brand (although
| some brands have their 'classics' that they keep selling
| for a long long time, like IKEA does).
| lupire wrote:
| IKEA furniture falls apart if it is disassembled for
| transport.
| schrijver wrote:
| Very little furniture is designed to be disassembled for
| transport though. But you're right in the sense that the
| flatpack format is pretty practical for transport and you
| only get that when you buy new. Second hand is always a
| bit more complicated for the human, even if better for
| the planet.
| kungito wrote:
| All my local furniture shops, including Ikea, have
| horrible, horrible experience. And it's the same for other
| shops. It's practically impossible to know all of the
| following:
|
| * is everything in the picture included * what are all the
| possible exterior dimensions of the product * what are the
| specifications of the products down to all the
| specifications which make you choose one product over
| another
|
| The saddest part is, lately it's been impossible to find
| this data on the manufacturers website as well. Basic
| things like how many nits does the TV have, how big does
| the front panel need to be for the dishwasher etc.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I'd bet a few dollars that for kids this generation
| everything virtual/AR is baseline.
| darcien wrote:
| Oh, that actually sounds like a cool idea for an AR app.
|
| Imagine using AR to add furnitures to your current room
| with furniture from a virtual catalogue. That way, you can
| see how your room would look like instead of imagining it
| inside your head.
|
| And if IKEA were to do it, they can just add shopping
| feature so the customer could purchase the furniture after
| trying it out inside their own room. That totally sounds
| like a killer app!
|
| I wonder if there's anything like that already on the
| market.
| robin_reala wrote:
| Geomagical are doing that: https://geomagical.com/
| Tomte wrote:
| > Imagine using AR to add furnitures to your current room
| with furniture from a virtual catalogue. That way, you
| can see how your room would look like instead of
| imagining it inside your head.
|
| It exists. The IKEA Smart app (from IKEA itself).
| Clewza313 wrote:
| IKEA has already built & launched that, it's called IKEA
| Place: https://www.ikea.com/au/en/customer-
| service/mobile-apps/say-...
|
| iOS only though: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ikea-
| place/id1279244498
| darcien wrote:
| Wow, I didn't know that was a thing, thanks for sharing
| it!
| dagw wrote:
| _Imagine using AR to add furnitures to your current room
| with furniture from a virtual catalogue_
|
| I don't know if they made it generally available, but I
| know IKEA made a demo/beta app that did just that.
| numpad0 wrote:
| What I'd rather bet is that in-discoverability is lucrative
| because it helps customers attach to products.
| agumonkey wrote:
| By in-discoverability you mean interacting with furniture
| through phones ? Could be. The old catalog was a powerful
| dream machine though.. now in terms of sales it might be
| much. Time will tell.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| That was certainly the bet about a decade or two ago in
| many industries.
|
| Now, over the past 5 years or so we're seeing online tech
| magazines move into print[0], record labels racing to get
| back up to speed for vinyl printing[1], and "lo-fi" looks
| and sounds and devices taking up a larger and larger space
| in pop culture[2].
|
| If anything, I get the sense that the younger generations
| are seeing the value in attention and peace, and are moving
| in directions that afford them more of that--or at least
| control over that in their own lives and thoughts.
|
| The general attitude, at least as far as I've discerned
| from my own observations, has been that "everything has
| it's optimal place" rather than adopting one tech to rule
| them all.
|
| [0] https://store.increment.com
|
| [1] https://longlivevinyl.net/2018/07/30/pressing-concerns-
| the-n...
|
| [2] I don't have a nice summary for this one. It's just
| everywhere I look.
|
| As with most things, I gather humanity is continually
| optimizing for itself. And what that looks like is what
| most gamblers usually get wrong because our foresight is
| often just that limited--especially when the result is
| going _back_ to something most people thought we were done
| with. We are just a bunch of monkeys acting strangely,
| after all.
| lupire wrote:
| Retro always has a hipster niche. But it's not mainstream
| majority.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I saw this a little ago and even though it's true that
| old ways have value, even in smartphone AR/VR era, I also
| have a feel that this revival was more or less a dead cat
| bounce and not something that will grow much more. Kids
| today live in the era of real time video + AR filters..
| there's a chance that this represent their magic /
| zeitgeist.
| rchaud wrote:
| IKEA's website is awful. Just as an example, here's something
| that was happening for months, before they fixed it late last
| year:
|
| When you login, there are two types of accounts you can log
| into. Ikea and Ikea Family. These are shown as tabs, and the
| tab labels are faint. The login screen defaulted to the Ikea
| Family, so my individual login never worked, again because
| the labeling wasn't clear.
|
| It wasn't until I was ready to reset my pw that I carefully
| looked at every screen element and noticed the tabs.
| kleiba wrote:
| You just described the reason for IKEA's decision:
| - "memories" - "as a teenager" - "decided against
| picking one up"
| GuB-42 wrote:
| That should be the opposite.
|
| GP has fond memories of a commercial brand, for a company,
| that should be priceless. He even intend to keep a catalog on
| his bookshelf, his kid will grow with an IKEA ad, for a
| company, that should be priceless.
|
| Except that there is no such thing as "priceless" for a
| company. And they probably put a price tag on that, and
| decided that the "childhood memories" value is not worth the
| costs.
| vidarh wrote:
| What you describe might well be a good reason for them to
| reprint a limited run of - maybe an older version - of the
| catalogue and sell them as mementos or put scanned versions
| online. E.g. old Argos catalogs are available here [1].
|
| Not so much for continuing to print new ones.
|
| [1] https://retromash.com/argos/
| robin_reala wrote:
| The scanned versions are online:
| https://ikeamuseum.com/en/our-catalogues/
|
| (the certificate has expired today; I'm trying to find
| who to alert about that)
| pessimizer wrote:
| Also: https://archive.org/details/ikea-museum-
| catalogues/IKEA%20Mu...
| iso1631 wrote:
| My kids (8 + 6) have poured through argos catalogues
| their whole lives thinking about toys. Rather than using
| that as a springboard into the app (quick QR code) where
| you can then click and deliver with your sainsburys
| order, Argos seems to be in a managed decline, getting
| rid of everything that differentiates it from
| competitors.
| vidarh wrote:
| Argos sales have been stable at around 4bn gbp a year in
| recent years as far as I can tell, but finally reported
| substantial growth after lockdown shifted most of their
| sales online. I'm not convinced holding on to their
| catalog as long as they did has done them any favours.
| iso1631 wrote:
| The growth seen in the area has gone almost entirely to
| amazon
| vidarh wrote:
| The growth I referred to was _explicitly Argos_ , which
| has seen consistent growth through all of 2020, with
| Nov/Dec being 8% up year over year.
|
| 8% isn't huge, but it contributed to the majority of
| Sainsbury's overall growth in the period, and it's a
| massive turnaround for Argos given it's revenues have
| basically stayed about the same level for a decade.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Online sales as a percentage of all retail sales in the
| UK have been steadily increasing by about 2pp per year
| for the last decade until 2019 [0]
|
| In 2020 this increased from 19% to 28%, from PS76b to
| PS99b [1]
|
| For Argos sales to only be up 8% in 2020, or PS320m,
| isn't good, it took just 1.3% of the extra online sales.
| Remember also that Argos (on the whole) remained open for
| collection during the lockdowns inside of Sainsburys.
|
| [0] https://www.ons.gov.uk/businessindustryandtrade/retai
| lindust...
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/315506/online-
| retail-sal...
| 1234throwaway wrote:
| your life experience is derived from a commercial furniture
| shop that sells homogenous timber-plastic furniture. maybe you
| should stop thinking about ikea
| bloqs wrote:
| Childhood memories are not dirtied by ideological or
| poltitical bias. They are pure unadulterated observation. A
| beautiful thing.
| Andrex wrote:
| Not necessarily worthy of reverence, though.
| bluedino wrote:
| I'm surprised at the amount of companies that still publish a
| substantial catalog in 2021.
|
| OWC/MacSales.com sends me one! I haven't bought any parts from
| them in years. At least the aftermarket car parts places stop
| sending you one after a few months of not buying anything.
| eppp wrote:
| You lose something when you dont have a catalog. I havent ever
| seen a website that was good at showing you options. Sure I can
| find whatever I am looking for specifically but I cant find
| things that I dont even know exist and might work better unless
| I happen to see someone write about it.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Weirdly during the pandemic Ikea's shopping experience _improved_
| for me - we ordered the desk online from home, I got a text
| saying it woukd be ready, drove up, parked in large numbered bay
| in their car park, texted back which bay I was in and a employee
| trolleyed the whole lot over. I quite understand that they would
| prefer I bought lunch for my kids and ten impulse purchases but
| for me it was a surprising win.
|
| If they shipped a paper catalogue and stuck to that model I can
| imagine people really taking to it.
| eplanit wrote:
| Can we beg ULine to do the same? Order one item and you'll be
| getting their wasted paper bricks every few weeks.
| SEJeff wrote:
| This is kind of sad actually. IKEA made one of the best Apple
| trolls (literally) of all time with their "book book":
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOXQo7nURs0
|
| They made it as a parody in the style of an iPhone reveal
| presentation from Steve Jobs.
| jennasys wrote:
| This just reminded me of the Horrorstor book I've had on my
| reading list for a while now:
| https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594745269
| wayanon wrote:
| If the stories are true about Apple AR glasses I'd weirdly enjoy
| a virtual stroll around IKEA from home.
| minikites wrote:
| Hacker News' priorities in a nutshell:
|
| Archaic furniture catalog halts printing: "How sad! What a loss
| to our culture!"
|
| Technology displaces millions of jobs, leaving real people
| destitute and without medical care: "That's just the free market,
| suck it up, rube!"
| rbobby wrote:
| If they charged for it I wonder how many people would subscribe?
| choward wrote:
| Paying just for ads? No thanks.
| tamaharbor wrote:
| I haven't been this upset since Radio Shack discontinued its
| yearly catalog.
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