IKEAbundance
Furnish 4.4 rooms today for the time price of one in 1985.
IKEA was started in 1943 by 17-year old Ingvar Kamprad, and has been the world's largest furniture retailer since 2008. The brand name is an acronym of founder Ingvar Kamprad's initials; Elmtaryd, the family farm where Kamprad was born; and the nearby village of Agunnaryd, Kamprad's hometown. There are 483 IKEA stores operating in 63 countries with 2024 sales of $52.87 billion. The IKEA website contains about 12,000 products. The world's largest IKEA store is located in Pasay, Metro Manila, Philippines. Much of IKEA's furniture is designed to be assembled by the customer. The company claims that this helps reduce costs and use of packaging by not shipping air.
IKEA has been a leading innovator in making furniture abundant. We looked at four products that have remained essentially unchanged since 1985. In most cases, their retail prices are actually lower today than 40 years ago. But the bigger story is in time prices. Back in 1985, blue-collar workers earned $8.73 per hour. Today, they earn about $31.34.
Adjusting for wages, the time prices of these products have dropped by an average of 77.2 percent. Put differently, the time price to furnish one room in 1985 will now furnish 4.4 rooms today.
Tip of the Hat: Jeremy Horpendahl
Learn more about our infinitely bountiful planet at superabundance.com. We explain and give hundreds of examples why more people with freedom means much more resource abundances for everyone in our book, Superabundance, available at Amazon.
Gale Pooley is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, an Adjunct Scholar at the Cato Institute, and a board member at Human Progress.
That's also a good thing because from 1985 to today, the average new home size rose by ~600 sq ft—a growth of about 36%. (From ChatGPT, which matches what I remember.) So you can furnish a larger house at much less cost.