IKEA has some of the best quality cheap furniture. To get something noticeably better you need to spend at least 2x for any given item; 3-5x is common for not at all fancy stuff.
It’s true, but they used to have some of the best quality cheap-mid priced furniture.
They changed their target market segment to lean into the “discards their furniture in less than 5 years” ICP, and they also heavily optimized for shipping (eg their bottom-end Kallax is now actually made of corrugated cardboard instead of plyboard, strength-to-weight is amazing, but still less durable).
So both are true, that they still represent “good value” in a dollar-per-value sense, but also lowered their absolute quality. (This is the exact point OP is making.)
I’m glad IKEA exists but it really only serves very specific use cases these days. They are great for the moves apartments every 12 months crowd and the needs a piece for the spare bedroom that will rarely get used crowd. They are also great for young kids furniture that will get trashed no matter what quality you buy.
I appreciate it for what it is but consumers really need to understand what they are buying.
OP is flat out wrong. Some SKUs got value engineered to be less durable over time to keep up with inflation (or material costs, i.e. solid wood is just more expensive now), i.e. expedite->kallax, billy. But new SKU enabled by new tech/manufacturing processes like their power coated steel / stamped metal pieces are absurd dollar per quality relative to engineered or even solid wood. Of course it's not to everyone's taste, but fundamental reality if ones taste is solid wood, that material is no longer abundant/cheap/affordable, like how we use to feed lobsters to prisoners. A $90 heavy duty BROR shelf is ~$30 IN 1990 DOLLARS, about a cost of a Billy back then, except it's larger and much stronger.
BILLY quietly slid from mid-tier to cheap tier in order to keep the nostalgic momentum. The twist is that there are certain products that people use as benchmarks of quality (like Arizona iced tea).
If the tier changes without some sort of inflection, you perceive it as degradation of quality.
Not a good example. Arizona tea is held in high esteem only because it never went up in price. The beverage itself has always been of a clearly dubious quality.
Some of my non-IKEA furniture were just really lucky finds. I was looking for bookcases at a time when there was no nearby IKEA, and they did not deliver.
I ended up going to a local store, finding an unfinished bookshelf that was able to paint to my liking. It was absolutely a BIFL find. Another I bought at a close-out sale.
There is no one suggestion, but rather piece things together. This was about a decade and a half ago, and it seems that everyone is hustling so good deals are hard to find.
I’ve found many beds ship with the minimum viable hardware to hold them together. You might see if you can find better screws/bolts/etc and replace the cheap ones that come with your frame.
