Dear Ikea

Dear IKEA,

I am writing you today to share my thoughts on your fine retail shopping establishment. Firstly, I enjoy the wide range of home products that your stores carry, and am often impressed with the reasonable pricing and ease of shopping for furniture goods... I've furnished multiple apartments with your products.

Secondly, I am not always the biggest fan of the quality of your furniture goods. They're not durable in a long-lasting sort of way for someone of my stature (6'2" pale white Irish-American looking man, not that looks have anything to do with it, but I'm just sayin'...), and aren't always designed to be disassembled and reassembled again. Maybe people are tinier in Sweden and have a more permanent living situation, but it seems to me that most people who buy IKEA items in the US are college students attempting to furnish a dorm room, or people that are moving out onto their own for the first time; I am an example of the latter.

I've had two pieces of furniture fail on me that I've bought from IKEA that I wanted to touch base on real quick. The first was from a couple years ago, my MALM queen-sized bed frame. The suspension rod (the SKORVA midbeam, I think) that supports the entire length of the bed tore one of the brackets out of its screws at the base of the bed when I sat down on it. Now I assure you, I am not a huge person, but am in the 200+ lbs range. It should be reasonable that this hold up for more than the couple of years that I owned it.

The second is about my POÄNG rocking chairs that I bought in December of 2009. I sat in them in the store and found them to be so comfortable that I opted to make them my primary chairs in my apartment. Over the weekend while I was rocking in my POÄNG, a screw snapped off leaving the front right edge of the seat to hang. Thinking that the screw had just become loose, I attempted to screw it back in only to see that it had been cleanly sheared off.

I wasn't immediately upset by this as I have an extra POÄNG that I was able to replace it with, but I am again disappointed in the quality of your furniture items that are intended to be laid or sat on. In both these cases, I find it not worth the effort to attempt and disassemble and return the items for exchange... especially so because I haven't saved the boxes or the receipts, and I am not familiar with the warranty on said items.

I will say, you make a mean EXPEDIT bookcase and LACK coffee table, so thank you for those. But, I will hesitate before I buy any of your other furniture items in the future. Thank you for the opportunity to vent.

Sincerely,

Daniel