More on Ikea

[bevans6]

I've been shopping and buying things at Ikea for probably 30 years, so the previous thread about Ikea didn't interest me all that much - I was kinda "been there, done that".  Two things just happened - I bought some office furniture for my home office at IKea, and I read an interesting article about the Canadian operation.  Thus I discovered two new things that I didn't know about Ikea...

First is their stuff is getting lighter!  Far from the almost impossibly heavy solid chipboard of my youth, some of their newer stuff is actually a quite hi-tech composite structure with light core materials - very strong, far lighter, probably still damaged by water the way chip-board is, but I value lightness a lot in a bus.  And it's still cheap as chips.  And looks cool if you like that style...

Second is that they have opened a significant new manufacturing facility in a town I actually visit every once in a while - Danville Virginia.  Not only last capital of the South, a mill town where the mills closed, a radically frustrating place to try to find dinner on a Saturday night (the whole town seems to line up at all the restaurants at once), the nearest town to Virginia International Raceway, one of the great American race tracks - it is now going to be producing up to 80% of some of Ikea's latest furniture designs for the North American market.

Way go go Ikea!  What a concept - employ people who actually live in your target market, so people can not only earn a good living making things, they can buy your stuff and support the local economy too!

Brian