Cheap (23 page)

 

 

 

CATALOGS are not documentaries, nor do we expect them to be. The IKEA story is one of a charmingly quirky Swedish retail chain founded by a stony but deeply caring entrepreneur who grew unimaginably rich on a diet of hard work and humble pie. But the reality is far simpler and far less romantic. IKEA succeeds the way all discounters do: by passing much of its costs on to us.

The chain has a policy of having relatively few stores—270 spread across thirty-five countries and territories. Most are enormous—in Atlanta, IKEA is nearly 366,000 square feet, about seven times the area of a football field. Like discount outlet malls, IKEA stores are positioned well outside city centers, in areas where huge spaces can be had at relatively low real estate and tax costs. This business model allows the company substantial economies of scale while at the same time compelling customers to drive very long distances—an average of 50 miles round trip in the United States. (In Europe some customers travel even farther: the north ernmost IKEA outpost in Haparanda, Finland, attracts customers within a 500-kilometer radius.) Customers must drive back to the store—if need be with sofa or bed or bookcase in hand—to return malfunctioning furniture or retrieve missing parts (a surprisingly frequent occurrence). Few IKEA outlets in the United States are accessible by public transportation, and since the company does not support a home delivery service, customers willing and able to take public transport rarely do so. As a result, the traffic jams surrounding IKEA stores are so gnarly that customers are discouraged from shopping on weekends when lines of idling cars can back up for miles. IKEA touts its “green side” by lighting its stores with low-wattage bulbs and charging extra for plastic bags while its clientele burns through gallon after gallon of fuel to buy disposable tables and lamps. Asked his assessment of company practices, MIT-trained urban development expert Wig Zamore said: “IKEA is the least sustainable retailer on the planet.”

 

 

 

IN 1939, Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter singled out key retail organizations as causing the “big disturbance.” He wrote that they “disrupt the existing system and enforce a distinct process of adaptation.” Typically, these outfits were founded by what he called “new men,” with “new capital.” Discounters from Woolworth to Walton to Kamprad are typical of these new men. None was born into the business he would one day dominate, and perhaps as a consequence none felt bound by traditional business practices. Neither Woolworth nor Walton showed any particular allegiance to his workers or provided for them beyond the minimum level necessary to promote profit. At IKEA, workers are treated with respect and consideration (they get benefits and sometimes bonuses), but they are interchangeable and ultimately disposable. The de-skilling of labor is as critical to IKEA’s business model as it is for every discount business model: Centralized capital, not craftsmanship, is where the power lies. This is no socialist screed, it is undeniable fact, and to accept it is to better understand the trade-offs.

Outsourcing to the customer critical functions—service, delivery, and assembly—keeps prices low by avoiding the cost of wages and benefits. It also avoids taxes on that labor, which means the roads leading to IKEA are not necessarily being paid for by IKEA. The
Wall Street Journal
wrote in 1994: “President Clinton’s 1993 tax increase boosted IKEA’s profits. IKEA likes to say that its growth has more to do with value than taxes, but in generations gone by, when lower taxes meant that Americans had more cash to spend, value meant solid oak or mahogany furniture, not veneer over particleboard or pine.” The “value” of IKEA resides not in the shopping experience, which most agree tends toward the frustrating. Nor does it necessarily reside in the merchandise. The value resides in the manufactured “adventure” of hunting down, hauling home, and using one’s own hands to cobble together a well-designed object. And the most fun by far is in the price itself.

Objects can be designed to low price, but they cannot be crafted to low price. Craftsmanship takes time, and time is the enemy of the discounter. A lamp, IKEA reminds us, is only a lamp. It has no feelings, and we are crazy to attach meaning to it. The logical response to this might be: Then why does IKEA name its lamps—and pillows and ice cream scoops? Doesn’t a name connote intimacy? Of course it does, and IKEA knows well the power of intimacy to move us. But it is their story—not our own—that the company wants us to conjure. It is intimacy on their schedule and by their rules. Flatpacks of medium-density fiberboard hauled out of sprawling warehouses and cobbled together with IKEA’s notorious L-shaped, six-sided Allen wrench are not tasteful, comfortable furniture. They are a facsimile of tasteful, comfortable furniture.

 

 

 

IN HIS DEEPLY considered book
The Craftsman,
New York University sociologist Richard Sennett reminds us that in old English a “job” meant “simply a lump of coal or a pile of wood that could be moved around at will.” Craftsmen do not have jobs; they have careers that build over years and decades from apprenticeship to master. Acquiring skills built on experience empower workers and raise prices, so purveyors of low price must commit to the principle that almost anyone can be an employee and almost any employee can do any job. This discounting of skills leads to their further decline and a further devaluing. And because discounters hold so much sway, this means that skilled and experienced workers of all varieties—tailors, cobblers, butchers, store clerks, travel agents—are increasingly scarce.

This is not to say that craftsmanship is dead. Far from it. We cheer it on at county fairs and applaud the craftiness of those who bake their own bread or shear, dye, and weave wool and knit it into a sweater. We applaud those who go into the wilderness to build their own cabin, plant their own gardens, or build kayaks out of wood strips. But few of us expect to find craft in everyday objects.

Those who regard craft as a euphemism for elitism overlook the fact that craftsmanship need not be precious or effete; it can be practical, simple, an everyday thing: a well-made table, a sturdy chair, a butcher or tailor or travel agent who knows his or her business. A bricklayer or carpenter or teacher, a musician or salesperson, a writer of computer code—any and all can be craftsmen. Craftsmanship cements a relationship of trust between buyer and seller, worker and employer, and expects something of both. It is about caring about the work and its application. It is what distinguishes the work of humans from the work of machines, and it is everything that IKEA and other discounters are not.

Craftsmen aren’t led to a “glorious future” paved with ever lower prices for “the many.” They rely on their own skill, commitment, and judgment, and take pride and satisfaction in the work itself. But to raise the issue of craft in the postindustrial age is to risk scorn. Our knowledge-based service economy demands razor-sharp wits, finely tuned synapses, quick reflexes, and, most of all, drive. We are warned that workers in the developing world are rapidly outpacing us. They are smarter, more dedicated, and more focused. They can program computers, write legal briefs, and diagnose disease expertly, quickly, and at an unbeatable low price. We must work smarter and quicker, which is to say, cheaper.

 

 

 

MASS MANUFACTURE long ago uncoupled consumption from production. We no longer think much about who made what we buy or how they made it. In a democracy, capitalism is about making things available to as many people as possible, which means as cheaply as possible. But every hand that touches an object increases its price, thereby reducing its accessibility. So when we swap craftsmanship for price, the trade seems fair, even virtuous.

A Billy bookcase costs $59.99. Loaded with heavy books, the particleboard shelves tend to buckle. If the owner attempts to modify it—such as trying to put in a couple of supports to bolster it—the screws lose purchase. Try too hard or too often, and the particleboard crumbles. We can spray-paint the bookcase or doll it up with stickers, but in all but the most superficial sense, the bookcase is beyond our reach to modify or customize. We must embrace it or at least accept it on its own terms, with its myriad limitations.

Is this a problem? Well, again, that depends. Millions of IKEA enthusiasts around the globe contort themselves to meet the needs of the brand. Rather than burden poor Billy to the breaking point, they carefully confine their heavy books to its perimeters: Center the paperbacks in the middle of the shelf and flank them with the Shakespeare anthologies and chemistry texts. The idea of what constitutes a bookcase—a sturdy unit to reliably hold whatever number and variety of books will fit snugly in its contours—is modified to accommodate the limitations of an object that is wonderful mainly for its sleek exterior and low price. In a very real sense, a Billy is not a bookcase but a subspecies of bookcase: a cheap bookcase. The same might be said for much of IKEA’s merchandise: It is not a great chair, it is a great cheap chair. It is not a great chest of drawers, it is a great cheap chest of drawers. When these objects break or buckle or otherwise disappoint, we don’t ask for sympathy. We
expected
it to happen.

Cheap objects resist involvement. We tend to invest less in their purchase, care, and maintenance, and that’s part of what makes them so attractive. Cheap clothing lines—sold at discounters such as Target and H & M—are like IKEA emblems of the “cheap chic” where style fills in for whatever quality goes lacking. There is nothing sinister in this, no deliberate planned obsolescence. These objects are not designed to fall apart, nor are they crafted not to fall apart. In many cases we know this and accept it, and have entered into a sort of compact. Perhaps we don’t even want the object to last forever. Such voluntary obsolescence makes craftsmanship beside the point. We have grown to expect and even relish the easy birth and early death of objects.

This phenomenon has spread to things both cheap and not so cheap. We expect our cell phones, our computers, our MP3 players to be worry free, to run perfectly with minimal intervention, but only for a certain period. When they fail, we typically don’t expect to be able to do much about it. The lithium-ion battery sealed inside an iPod typically loses roughly 70 percent of its functionality. Apple will replace the batteries for about $60 plus shipping and handling, but customers are discouraged from doing this themselves—the case was not designed to be opened.

We Americans once reveled in our reputation for self-sufficiency. We were tinkerers, fixers of things. Yet while many of us can recall our parents wrestling into compliance a recalcitrant toaster or washing machine, few of us today would attempt the same with a malfunctioning microwave oven, digital camera, or anything built up from a computer chip. Appliances, electronics, and automobiles are black boxes, impervious to probing and resistant to repair. Getting into the guts of things is difficult, and if we dare trespass in the innards of what we thought belonged to us, we do so at the risk of the guarantee. Even seasoned professionals are losing heart. In less than two decades, the Professional Service Association lost three-quarters of its small appliance and consumer electronics shop members. During that same period the number of electronics repair shops plummeted from twenty thousand to five thousand. Repair people of all stripes have fallen into obscurity. Sesame Street closed its “Fix-it Shop” in 1996, stating as its reason that young viewers were unlikely to encounter one.

As political philosopher Matthew B. Crawford observed, an emerging engineering culture of “hide the works” has rendered “the artifacts we use unintelligible to direct inspection.” Not knowing or caring how an object is made, we are, he said, “disburdened of involvement.” If the exterior is pleasing, what goes on under the hood is of no concern to us. It is only when we try to penetrate the object, to modify or fix it, that we realize what we’ve given up. If we do not have mastery over our objects, our objects certainly have mastery over us. There are advantages to this. “It’s a sort of freedom,” Crawford said. “But such freedom allows your own agency to get displaced. Having mastery over our own stuff is very satisfying, and we’ve traded that for convenience. So in a sense we don’t really own the stuff, we lease it. And I think that haunts us.”

Perhaps it haunts us because not long ago almost everyone had access to craftsmanship. This was true not only of consumer goods—clothing, toys, home goods—but of things more fundamental, such as shelter. The house I live in—a “poor man’s” Victorian—was built for a blue-collar family. A carpenter, his wife, and four kids shared the place with a paying boarder in the attic. It is not large or terribly fancy, but it is well situated and solid enough to have withstood the rigors of 141 New England winters. I expect it will last at least 141 winters more. Amortizing the cost of this home over its working life, the value by today’s standards becomes astonishing.

Brent Hull, a Texas-based architectural designer, told me that things are different today, that well-crafted homes are rarely built for the ordinary consumer. This is not because the price of craftsmanship is prohibitive—many poorly crafted homes cost more—but, rather, because many home buyers do not expect it, he said. Then he added something surprising: “Most of us don’t think we deserve it.”

We didn’t always think this way. Houses built at or before the turn of the nineteenth century were built carefully. In the early 1940s this began to change. The Depression and the war had made housing stock scarce, and those studying the shortage concluded that “only by creating an industrial environment conducive alike to volume expansion and cost reduction can an approach to meeting the housing need be accomplished.” Not everyone agreed, arguing that while the housing shortage was real, substantial gains could be made by simply rejuvenating old stock. Wrote one observer, “The prophylaxis of housing disease cannot be limited to the construction industry.” But this view was trampled in the rush to cash in on the postwar prosperity. Builder William Levitt captured the zeitgeist perfectly: “Any damn fool can build homes. What counts is how many you can sell for how little.”