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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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".
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.
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.
Sort of the whole point of a futon is that you put it in the closet during the day so you can reuse the space as your living room. Your bed just takes space that you don't use for 2/3 of the day.
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.
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.
> 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.
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. ?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
I'm not sure it's misconception. When I was a student a very long time ago on holidays I used to work in a paper mill in various departments laboratory and engineering departments, mechanical, instrumentation, electrical etc.
The UK paper making industry has (and had) been in decline for decades for many reasons but the main issue is cost, more specifically energy costs. Second to those costs were material resources.
This paper mill was a recycling paper mill and the cost to produce acceptable standard paper was enormous. It used an enormous amount of gas to feed it's huge boilers producing steam, it even had it's own water turbine generators fed by the local river it was built alongside to produce electricity. It supplemented this with electricity from the grid which was even more expensive. It's biggest customer I'm fairly sure was McDonalds
Pulp was shipped in from Norway because again it was cheaper, at that time 100% recycled paper was not profitable and pulp from the UK was too expensive. When the company went into administration most of it's equipment which was old even at that time was bought by companies from China.
This mill was old, dating back to 1880 and it's infrastructure was part of the reason of it's demise. But there were 2 other paper mills in the same small town that eventually met the same demise, one being a much more modern construction, however it lasted longer by specialising in more profitable products such as tissue.
The paper industry is not carbon efficient, it will be much more efficient than it used to be but it still takes a huge amount of energy to produce. In lower volume it could be but consumerism dictates it isn't, it's why China is the largest paper making country in the world now.
I do have some fond memories working there even though it was hard work, at christmas time when the mill would shutdown it was absolutely freezing and doing a 12 hour shift on boxing day working inside a 5 storey high boiler was maybe not so pleasant. There were some wonderful quirks about the place, where the turbine generators were you could climb below the workshop floor where the bypass outflow was and you'd find one or 2 people sitting on wooden girders above the water fishing on their lunch break
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.
>Most paper, at least in Europe, is actually recycled.
Recycling is terrible too, you waste tons of fresh water to wash out the color and contaminate it with soap and all that toxic colors, and the glossy paper is even worse because it's normally not recyclable, so it's made to carton or burned.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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 Stålenhag'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
> 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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
Here is a challenge for you, get some dog crap on your hand and spray it with a garden house then sniff your hand. Unless you are soaping and scrubbing your ass deep, it isn't going to be 100% sanitary regardless of using paper or a bidet. They are nice, but in the end it doesn't matter.
You need a fast internet connection. And a fast computer. Even your older iPhone probably can’t handle the online catalog anymore. After a few pages, you just give up.
But with a paper catalog, you can put it down. Circle it. Fold it. Rip pages out. Write on it. Then discard it. You can rifle through the pages, and dream of how you want your home to be laid out.
It is too bad they designed it poorly. I regularly test my sites with older devices and ensure even a 25yo PC can access it. It,s not that difficult, just a bit tedious.
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
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 £76b to £99b [1]
For Argos sales to only be up 8% in 2020, or £320m, 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.
> 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].
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.
>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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
Kids grow up. The instant gratification hit gives way over time as we gain exposure to the world, and to mastery.
Without a doubt real-time video sharing and VR/AR will colour our world and help shape the future. They already have.
But that's not the point I was making. It's that, without certain knowledge of the future many people are willing to generalize and write off "old technology" in a fleeting way and without reflection.
Upon further reflection (using the music industry as an example), something like a vinyl music record was optimized for human attention and appreciation of a certain type of artwork. The industry, beginning in the 80's through the early 2000's, figured people would only care for convenience, and "good-enough" quality.
The current market forces have shown them to be wrong in their assumption that was the sum of what made music listening and purchases worthwhile. In reality, the experience from end-to-end really shaped the value of it.
From the sensual aspects of browsing a record store—smells, feeling, sociability, exposure to new art—to taking the physical object home, opening it, and performing the ritual of setting it on the turntable and tuning a system to play it back to your pleasure.
A lot of that was lost in the novelty of being able to carry your favourite songs everywhere in your pocket. The industry adapted, began to shut down old production facilities and retire old machinery.
When the novelty wore off and people were seeking more of an experience and less commodity the industry was not prepared for it.
It's getting there now. And I think we've ended up with what's approaching the best of all possible worlds: we've got convenience when we want it, and a selection of encompassing experiences for those who appreciate them.
The big mistake was the same big mistake humanity will make over and over again as it optimizes for itself: hubris. Illustrated by: "We've learned something new and incredible! Well now we know everything."
We never do, of course. But regardless, barring some forced eternal austerity or all-consuming catastrophe, humanity continues to optimize for itself always narrowing on on the mean good (often exercising a range of potential outcomes along the way from inconsequential to horrendous).
Relating to the larger subject at hand: paper is optimal in so many ways and the environmental aspects become only technical problems to be solved, not philosophical ones about whether or not it's worth it. Being so ready to erase something like that and force humanity onto tablet computers or some other novel technology is such a fine illustration of hubris it's almost trite.
> Kids grow up. The instant gratification hit gives way over time as we gain exposure to the world, and to mastery.
Yes, I meant this in a generation-period sense. For 10-20 years AR/VR will be the fad that this kid will run for until they grow up. But it may also be strong enough to shift the culture long term.
I feel the same about 'old' not being lesser than new. Many spoke about how strange this feeling is. How limited 8bit games were full of wonders, weird illustrations. Yes the feeling of browsing small or big stores for items (music, books or else).. it's all part of our lives and 24/7 digital nomad with all of spotify.. doesn't compensate for this somehow.
I spend a lot of time reading about old tech. Sometimes I'm astonished but the ingenuosity or beauty (log slider rules are my favorite computing device now). I powered an old tape drive and the mechanics and sound felt special.. and more fun than the latest tech that is so invisible to our sense. I smile watching how tape decks were made, trivial tech (bits of metal, holes and springs) yet it's not less complex than a program.
I think the best we can really do is look at each successive generation's cultural adoption. Besides something like vinyl, there are many phenomena that persist in spite of being "outdated". I mean, a car will get us somewhere faster, but people still ride horses for other reasons—and for reasons that a car will never be able to even emulate.
The article on vinyl production points at a market much larger than a "hipster niche"—it's the very source of the production issues they faced: the resurgent market was much larger than any company in the industry predicted.
It's not about "retro", it's about ephemera and ritual and appreciation.
Certainly, dedicated fans of music exist in all aspects of human culture and not just western ...hipsterdom.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They're headquartered in the Netherlands and it sucks here as well. Their operations are not optimised for a high volume of online orders and their website does a really poor job of handling that.
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)
> 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.
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.
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 10€ 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...
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.
> 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...
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 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
Yes, that would not work. It would have to be a hands-free operation as in a headset. You cannot both use both hands to assembly a furniture and then hold you phone at the same time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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_.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
They could have charged a fee high enough to plant two trees for every one that went into the catalog. Sears died when the catalog did - but with IKEA I have never seen the catalog so maybe it is waste.
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.
I hope this means they're pouring serious resources into revamping their website, then. Recently did an order for delivery and it was endlessly frustrating.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.