How Ikea's Billy bookcase took over the world
There&#x27;s a disconnect when I look at the price of good furniture compared to products that are insanely more complicated (laptops, smartphones), heavier than furniture (motorbikes, snowblowers, lawnmowers), as bulky as flatpack bookcases (big screen TVs), and need to be shipped even greater distances than furniture (all my examples would be coming to the U.S. from Asia).<p>Furthermore, furniture has much less regulation than electronics and motorized things (so it should be cheaper), furniture needs much less capital (a new TV manufacturing facility would cost hundreds of millions of dollars), and designing a new piece of furniture needs a tiny fraction of the engineers and programmers that any new laptop, TV, or smartphone would require.<p>I think that good furniture in general is still grossly expensive and I don&#x27;t understand where the money is going.<p>EDIT: I have an example: I have a Sharp 60-inch TV, bought in 2011 for $1319.99, and weighs 92.6 pounds or 42 kg according to the spec sheet. I also have a dining room table bought the same year for ~$1200 and which weighs less than the TV. Considering that the TV is literally a <i>million times more complicated</i> than the table and that the raw materials of the TV (sand-&gt;silicon-&gt;ICs, petroleum-&gt;plastics) have undergone vastly greater transformation than a table (wood, glue, iron-&gt;nails), why isn&#x27;t the TV much more expensive or the table much cheaper? Both are commodities and both are made on assembly lines.