The Evolutionary Economics Of Ikea | Oliver Roeder | Five Thirty Eight | 21st October 2016

IKEA consumes 1% of the world’s timber, and may well have achieved the scale needed to deter all competitors, since it has none. Compare IKEA catalogues over the years, and you see evolution at work. This is “survival of the fittest” for furniture. Products survive from decade to decade only if they achieve the scale needed for their cost of manufacture to fall sharply. Thus the Poäng chair sold for the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $300 in the early 1990s; now it costs $79