Chapter 1 - IKEA discontinues White Oak BILLY bookcase.
As inflation starts biting more and more it will become more important to understand if you are getting good value for the money.
It will be necessarry to skip the glossy advertising and reach to the source - Swedish Socialism - for reputable, consistent and relevant information.
Part of Caring for Environement means reducing your footprint on the planet and Swedish Socialism solves that. You get dependable, community centred and shared information and ideas that ARE helping - first and foremost ~you~; remember, you have to be successful first before you can help others to be successful.
Furniture destined for the Western Market is rarely made in the Western Market, that's not simply how our economy works. I personally experienced the birth of globalization - I'm stuck in the 90's; that's 'my decade' - and it was always sold to me as delivering democracy via economic means. Various metrics point to the success of that era - untold numbers of individuals were 'lifted out of poverty'.
If you were a giant behemoth - like IKEA; it's mainly the purchasing power - but also you were forward thinking because you lacked the traditional 'institutional inertia' of other companies, meant that you could experiment with new ways of reducing your labour requirements to produce what I consider a very useful and practical human designs.
IKEA created a new vision for furniture. When a table design that inlcuded 'an elegant end-vise' won an award from IKEA for 'forward thinking functionality' - not yet defined! - it gives you a glimpse, a preview of what humanity is about.
Humanity is about creativity and improvement. I'm on REDDIT - it's considered 'social media' but I don't view it quite like that - and read a common observation that 'carpenters job does not scale up' like, for example, tech workers jobs scale up. This is the reason cited for a lower pay range of 'carpenters vs. tech workers'. That gave me quite a pause, and I thought about that statement extensively. I replied too.
The value of tech-worker and carpenter is identical and if properly grown and 'harvested for ideas' both are excellent life style choices. Greatest value in trade work, in my opinion, lies in the fact that a 'trades person' has a skillset that allows them to easily manipulate their surroundings. When you pair that up with human-centred design on the most granular level - individual; iDesign - you solve the greatest challenge posed to Interior Design in Human History - yours.
Solving for that solution and finding it successfully has immesearuable positive outcomes. You start living - I am serious. Simple, small elevations that move 'away from the standard' and into your own 'personal comfort zone' [I call that luxury] is all that is required for an 'elevated life'.