Here’s a picture of the furniture my grandparents left me:
A whole a house or just this room?
Anyway: Amazing.
All I got was the IKEA family card. Free coffee. Yeah.
If cheap furniture made by compressing glue and sawdust together existed 100 years ago, I bet it would have sold well.
Same goes for shoes. Everyone’s wearing terrible plastic stuff nowadays.
People bought mail order houses, which I think confirms the popularity of lightweight and portable big purchase items.
Chipboard was one of those things invented twice simultaneously during WWII, as the Germans and Americans looked around for resources to exploit and noticed the massive amounts of sawdust they had piling up. Chipboard cabinetry and furniture starts to emerge in the 1950’s. Ikea was founded in 1943 and started selling furniture in 1948. So cheap particle board furniture existed ~80 years ago, and did indeed sell well.
Im leaving my grandkids a very cleanly optimized starter base in Factorio.
That’s an amazing gift
“This is yours now, son. A little bit of water spilled on it 3 weeks ago, so it will fall apart if you use it.”
Or, “this was a table when it began the long journey from my house to yours, but it couldn’t handle the vibrations of the journey (or didn’t appreciate being disassembled so that it wouldn’t have to stand up to the vibrations), so I now bequeath you this pile of fine wood (fine as in the pieces of wood used are very small)!”
Though, tbf, that hasn’t been my experience with IKEA furniture I’ve gotten. But it has been with the cheap Canadian Tire furniture I’ve gotten. Worst part is that it’s not even priced lower than the IKEA stuff. So now I’m willing to drive almost 2h to get to the nearest IKEA if I don’t feel like paying the even more ridiculous prices for the decent furniture sold at furniture stores.
I mean, not anytime soon, but hopefully eventually.
Now, I’m not sure what you do for a living, but personally, as a software engineer, I know that most people in my career line usually end up as either carpenters or farmers as their career peak. I’m more partial to the farming branch myself, but if you go carpenter, you can leave your grandkids some fancy ass furniture.
Woodworker here, I’ve already built some things that will last longer than I will. Not so sure about “fancy ass” but they’re not particle board.
I’ve always thought woodworking would be a fun hobby. I expect to get into it one day.
Too exhausted to grab images but…
-
The amount I spent on college versus the amount that they spent on college
-
their pension versus my pension
-
cost of their home versus cost of my home
-
amount of adults in their household that had to work to support a family versus amount of adults in my household that have to work to support a family
-
Their CEO pay gap versus my CEO pay gap
-
number of summers where they took a week-long family vacation versus number of summers that I took a week-long family vacation
-
cost of a family trip to Disney for them versus no fucking way I could even consider affording that shit, let alone paying an overall subscription for quicker lines and somehow also individual extra charges per ride to get on those rides in less than three hours.
-
You mean one portal to hell vs one support call line to Sweden.
The Lion, the Witch, and the SMÅGÖRA
The Blåhaj, the Witch, and the Smågöra
What’s the difference?
I’ve actually never found a name of an IKEA product to be fake. They can be obscure, odd, and some would normally be split. But never truly fake. Though, FEJKA does mean “to fake”. Which is an honest name for a series of fake plants.
Yeah, don’t know what that “fake” is all about. It’s a Swedish company that gives Swedish names to their product lines and actually seems to care about maintaining their reputation for good design instead of enshitification so they can gouge their loyal customers until they realize they shouldn’t be loyal anymore.
Though I do wonder why I don’t mind IKEA’s Swedish product names but find Starbucks’ use of Italian words for cup sizes to be insufferable…
Starbucks isn’t Italian, for one.
Starbucks sizes aren’t really descriptive. Tall is the small size and the only one named in English, grande means large in Italian but is actually the medium-sized cup, and venti means twenty in Italian which is meant to be twenty ounces but the name doesn’t tell you how big it is compared to the other sizes. It’s dumb.
Lol that gives it a similar energy to people who get Japanese tattoos without knowing what the kanji even mean, only to later find out that what they thought said “powerful warrior” actually means “one udon meal set, please”.
Because everyone else uses “small, medium, large” and it’s annoying to have to switch when that’s something you commonly use. Whereas furniture lines often have made up or creative names because companies need some names to differentiate the 20 different dining room tables they sell. Other retailers might use “the classic collection” and “the modern collection” or whatever. But it’s not standardized like small, medium, and large.
I don’t go to Starbucks very often, usually only in a pinch… but if you say “I want a large coffee,” they know what you mean. At most, they’ll say something like “do you mean grande or venti?” and I say, “the bigger one” or whatever.
I’ve never been to a Starbucks. But from the content I see about them online, they do seem like a typical American fakery outlet.
Venti, that’s twenty in Italian, is a cup of twenty American stupidity units of coffee. And their new CEO has a commute in excess of 1600km!
Even if I enjoyed coffee, I would find somewhere else to spend my money.
That totally leads to Narnia
Where does the IKEA one lead?
A Target in Modesto
The self checkout line in a Walmart after an especially hot summer day.
Will there be mythical creatures there too?
The one on the left took 5 months to make by monks in Tibet slave camps brought to you by China. The one on the right was made in 437.23 seconds by a Tormak 7000 series CNC discombobulizer 2000.
Sounds like an appliance from The Sims.
Enjoy your affordable Swedish crap!
I’m going to take a different view of this for people to consider:
My dad collected a lot of stuff. He wasn’t a hoarder because most of the stuff had value, but he had so many collections: Coins, stamps, cigarette cards, movie posters, movie memorabilia, LPs, CDs, DVDs, so many other things.
When he died, I had to deal with it. All of it. And I am not a material goods sort of person overall, so I didn’t want most of it. It took me years to sell off what I could. We couldn’t even sell off most of the DVDs, LPs and CDs. They ended up either given to friends or to thrift stores. I’m still dealing with it even though he died in 2016. Who wants a life-sized ceramic bust of Charlie Chaplin (dog for scale)?
Did I make money from selling it off? Absolutely. It even helped when we needed some money. But it really wasn’t worth the near-decade of stress I’ve had to go through to deal with this stuff and there really is no end in sight.
And now my mom is in her 80s and she has a house full of antique furniture like this which, again, I have no interest in (and no room for at this point).
Do not make your kids deal with this stuff unless they really want to. I said I would deal with it because my mom is just not good at this stuff and my brother lives too far away, but if I would do it again, I would either hire someone to deal with it all for a percentage and wash my hands of the whole thing or tell my dad that he needs to sell it off before he dies.
Instead of having a few items from my dad to really treasure, I ended up with a bunch of shit I didn’t want to deal with and it makes the stuff I do want to keep, most of which wouldn’t be worth a huge amount anyway, have much less sentimental value to me.
i understand all that but i don’t know how big your dog is
She has a head relatively the same size of a life-size ceramic Charlie Chaplin bust.
Wow, that’s quite a knickknack to have around.
How often do you have to explain to visitors that it’s Charlie Chaplin and not that other guy?
Never because it’s in a box in the garage. I’ve never been a huge Chaplin fan like my dad was. He’s much better when he’s serious than when he’s trying to be funny. The “look up, Hannah” speech at the end of The Great Dictator is definitely one of the great movie speeches and I highly recommend anyone here who hasn’t seen the movie at least read it, but his “kick each other in the pants” style of comedy never appealed to me. I was much more into Keaton.
I will say that I picked through my mom’s old LP collection and sprang for a player so I could start listening to some of her classic albums. Now I periodically throw on some Springstein or Beetles because its right there and I can. I also picked up a few newer records - the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack, Father John Misty - and listen to them, too.
No idea what I’m going to do with my mom’s grand piano. She keeps trying to off-load that on me and all I can tell her is “It literally will not fit in the house.”
My dad was not into rock music at all. His collection was mostly film soundtracks, classical music and popular music from the 1930s and 1940s.
I like all of those things, but not enough to save the LPs or CDs. I can stream or download any of the ones I really want to listen to and enjoy it just as much, but not have it take up room in my not especially large house.
You have to understand, we’re talking thousands of LPs and CDs and hundreds of DVDs. Some of them were worth something, but most of them were worth pennies. The month I paid more to eBay than I did make any profits, I gave up.
This is just one part of the CD collection when it was still in their house. There were multiple other shelves.
I can’t find a picture of the LPs, but imagine a wall of them the size of 1.5 garage doors.
And this is just the music. This doesn’t begin to go into all the other stuff.
On top of everything else, he eventually got a DVD duplicator and a CD duplicator and just got whatever he wanted from video stores and the library and copied them. We just threw those out.
By the way, stamp collections are barely worth it unless you have a super rare stamp. He had a huge collection of first-day covers he had been collecting for my whole life. It went for $400.
You have to understand, we’re talking thousands of LPs and CDs and hundreds of DVDs
Oh yeah. You’ve got to weed out the good stuff from the bad. I took maybe 1-in-5 from my mom’s far smaller collection of LPs.
On top of everything else, he eventually got a DVD duplicator and a CD duplicator and just got whatever he wanted from video stores and the library and copied them. We just threw those out.
The worst thing I ever did was buy my mom a printer. She would go through stacks of paper in a month, just printing out whatever she thought she wanted to remember on the internet and sticking it in filling cabinets. I refused to show her how to change out the toner at one point, and that’s largely staunched the flow of dead trees.
By the way, stamp collections are barely worth it unless you have a super rare stamp.
Like all hobbies, you really need to find a community of other hobbyists before they’re worth anything at all. Even a super-rare stamp has no value unless its got an actual buyer. And how many people even still care if you’ve got a Civil War double-stamped limited edition whateverthefuck anymore? Unless you’re selling it straight to a museum, where are the buyers?
I do wonder whether I’ll live to see people with these giant Magic: The Gathering card collections claiming value at six-figures plus when WotC has long since gone bust and nobody plays the game anymore.
My wife’s cousin had a massive collection of Yu-Gi-Oh cards- we’re talking like fill a suitcase massive- and they’re basically worthless. He gave them all to our nephew about 10 years ago. He’s 18 now so I have no idea what he’ll do with them.
Reminds me of one of my favourite lines from Lock Stock:
These people don’t have any money, they can’t even afford new furniture!
Yeah but does the one on the left fit a rack server? I think not!
The one on the left can probably fit the very first rack server.
one is significantly 1) more useful and 2) does not cost $4000 to move next time the shitty apartment you’re renting gets sold to be “renovated” into luxury (cardboard) condos.
