Missing the screws of IKEA.....

A friend of mine had a cabin deep in the boondocks of Norway a few years ago. Rather than buying his groceries in town, he decided to do the whole weekend shopping in the small and local grocery store. The grocer was happily ringing up the large pile of stuff – small stores like these are not normally the place you do substantial shopping, least of all when you don’t live in the village.  He hesitated when he saw the bread my friend had selected, then dived into a shelf under the counter, brought out another loaf of bread, and put it on top of my friend’s pile with the words ”I think you deserve a fresh loaf!”

I’ve been thinking about this little anecdote lately. You see, I currently seem to be in the furniture business.  This is not by choice, but because it has turned out to be very hard to buy decent furniture. After many years of IKEA, my wife and I finally had saved enough to go and buy some decent furniture, loosely defined as stuff you don’t have to assemble yourself.  We spent lots of time selecting and ordering an armoire and a large dining table from an exclusive workshop in Western Norway, and a sofa table and an end table from a no less exclusive furniture store just outside Oslo.

Imagine our surprise when the furniture arrived, and we, after a short period of distant admiration started to inspect the goods more closely. It turned out that none of the four pieces of furniture we had bought (at a price roughly six times of what similar stuff cost at IKEA) was of a quality the price should indicate. Instead, they were worse than what IKEA makes, all of them. The armoire, a splendid piece with glass doors and “flame-patterned” birchwood, was made of materials that had chipped in the ends. The endpieces had not been painted, so raw wood shone through the staining. A small piece of the doorframe that wouldn’t quite fit was bolted on with two large wood screws. The dining room table had so large height differences between each leaf that if you had tried to stand a wine glass across two leaves it would have toppled.  The sofa and end tables were chipped and had substantial paint imperfections.

The shop and store replaced the goods after four months – but with goods that had the same blemishes.  From the store we eventually got the money back (and I sent them a bill for interest, since that is what they do if you don’t pay on time.) The shop has gotten another chance, after the furniture designer visited us, berated the shop people via telephone and told us that we should not settle for this shoddy work. (It eventually turned out they still couldn’t do it, so we sent it all back).

This little furniture experience has taught me something about history and nostalgia. Apparently, many people long back to the good old days – back to small, cozy grocery stores where everyone knew each other, to farms where people lived the simple, natural life, buying things from small artisan companies with long traditions.  They think the latter have been out-competed by large multinationals which through predatory pricing and market collusion have made survival of the small company an impossibility.

I don’t think so – or, at least, that is not the only explanation.  It wasn’t competition from large chains that made the village grocer try to sneak bad bread onto his customers – it was rather lack of competition. It is not competition from IKEA that makes expensive furniture stores sell shoddily produced goods.  If we go back in history, it wasn’t force from large companies that made workers take jobs in dirty factories, but rather that those jobs were better than the “pastoral hell” of the cozy, old-fashioned farm.

The picture-postcard version of the old days is wonderful – reality is a more nuanced picture.  People are smart. They want quality at a good price.  If the cheap, large vendor can deliver consistent quality, then the small company has to do the same. (I’ll make a possible exception for the small vintner here.)