Darren Levin: Why do we keep falling for flatpack furniture?
It’s the biggest consumer con since the self-serve checkout. So why do we continue to fill our houses with flatpack furniture that we just can’t seem to put together right, asks Darren Levin.
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If you did a quick audit of your kitchen’s bottom drawer how many Allen keys would you find?
The answer is too many, and you can blame the tools behind flatpack furniture for that.
The biggest consumer con since the self-serve checkout, flatpack furniture is not convenient or efficient, and it’s certainly not making your life any easier.
When you go to the supermarket you’re going there to buy grapes – not weigh and bag them – and when you step into a furniture store you’re not there to enrol in an amateur woodwork class. You want a nice sturdy shelf to house your rapidly expanding collection of Japanese psychedelic-rock vinyl and you don’t want to spend nine hours building it – and then rebuilding it when you realise you’ve had the first panel in the wrong place the whole time. Now you’re going to have to use the supplied plastic wrench to unwash all the washers and unbolt all the bolts. It’s enough to make you completely nuts before your rickety shelf is even done.
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You won’t be surprised to find out the sadists responsible for flatpack furniture are the same people behind more relationship breakdowns than any other entity: Ikea.
Everyone’s favourite meatball scented maze popularised this trend – is officially the worst thing to happen to furniture since velvet poufs and beanbag chairs.
Originally, the company was pretty revolutionary and ushered in a new area of cheaply mass produced furniture that could be shipped to anywhere in Sweden – from Sexträsk to Pissholmen, Middelfart to Horred. (Yes, those are real Swedish towns that I googled just now.)
There’s no questioning flatpack furniture is a triumph of design, but is it really making our lives better? It’s definitely making IKEA’s bottom line better, turning a tiny mail order business into a global marriage destroyer that now turns over more than $60 billion a year.
And that really is what all this ready-to-assemble malarky is all about: selling you the illusion of cheaper bookshelves, storage cubes, doll houses, and basketball hoops by passing the assembly costs onto us.
Is an entire afternoon of quality family time really worth the $80 you save on a TV unit you’ll likely need to replace in 10 months’ time?
If you actually costed up the hours spent building flatpack furniture over the course of your life, you’d be better served travelling back in time, doing a cabinetry apprenticeship, and building an entire living rooms’ worth of quality furniture you’ll be able to keep forever.
My 96-year-old grandfather owned a proper furniture business back in the 1950s. When I asked him whether he shipped customers planks of wood in a box to customers he got more riled up than the time they cancelled Colombo.
What’s that, I hear you say? It’s not that hard?
Even if you’re pretty handy with a screwdriver, the instructions for these units are phonebook sized and about as easy to follow as Ulysses by James Joyce.
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Unsurprisingly, it’s hard to find stats on flat-pack-furniture that weren’t commissioned by furniture assembly companies, but in a 2012 survey of 1,500 Brits, one in 10 said they set aside an entire day for assembly. That’s pretty consistent with the anecdotal accounts I’ve heard over summer, where no less than three dads told me they spent a full weekend putting together an adjustable basketball ring from Kmart.
Sure, there’s a sense of personal pride and achievement in building something for your family from the ground up.
But is it really worth the anxiety of knowing there was one screw leftover and the whole thing could come crashing down at any point?