Labor Day 2021

I have never been in an IKEA store. I don’t know much about the company or its products, except that they sell a lot of kit furniture that you assemble at home. Our oldest grandson has a platform bed that came from IKEA. I helped assemble it a couple of different times when their family moved from one home to another. It is a little bit complex, but not all that difficult. Plus it is well-built enough to be taken apart and put back together again. This has not been true of other kit furniture in my experience. Over the years there have been computer desks, printer stands and other bits of kit furniture that I have assembled. Most of it has been made from particle board and doesn’t last too long. In my experience, items from the IKEA store are of a bit better quality, with hardwoods and quality fasteners.

There are quite a few jokes about IKEA stores and products. Most of them fall a bit short with me because I just have never gotten into shopping in their stores. Then again, I’ve never been into furniture shopping in the first place. We bought a rocking chair when we were expecting our first child. It came from an unfinished furniture store. I stained and finished the chair. It has been a fixture in our home since, though it needs a bit of touchup after 40 years of service. We did purchase a new sofa, a couple of end tables and an easy chair a few years ago. There is a trundle bed that we bought after our children moved away from home. For the most part, however, our home is furnished with items that we got from family members. When relatives were downsizing or moving they offered us pieces of furniture and we accepted the gifts. It has worked out well for us.

So here is the IKEA joke that I can remember well enough to re-tell: Have you heard that the president of IKEA has become the head of Sweden? He is still assembling his cabinet.

Here in the Pacific Northwest IKEA and other kit furniture stores are popular enough that “furniture assembler” is a category in search engines and there are people who make their living assembling kit furniture for others. I’ve joked about making that my second career. As I said, I haven’t assembled much kit furniture, but I do have a bit for my power driver that fits the hex key screw heads in IKEA furniture. At two screws per slat in a platform bed, it makes sense to use the power driver. I’m good at reading and following instructions. I’m not intimidated by tasks such as installing drawer slides. After all, the kit furniture has the holes drilled by a CNC machine, so they are all properly aligned. It is way easier than installing drawer slides in other new furniture or cabinets. Speaking of cabinets, I know IKEA makes kitchen cabinets an other permanently installed items.

I suppose I might visit an IKEA store one day, though I don’t think we have an immediate need for furniture and I think that a lot of people buy IKEA over the computer and have the products delivered. There are, however, large IKEA stores in Renton, Washington and Vancouver, British Columbia. Both are about 75 miles from where we are. The Canada store is only about 35 miles from our son’s farm, but the pandemic makes border crossing tricky, though the border is open to US citizens at the present. Then there are the issues of making purchases in a foreign country and customs declarations upon re-entry, and I don’t know much about any of that.

I was thinking about IKEA this Labor Day because there was an article on the BBC website that was about supply chain issues at IKEA stores in Great Britain. The problems have their roots both in the Covid-19 pandemic and in the changes in rules brought about by Brexit. All across Great Britain there is a shortage of trucks and truck drivers. With rule changes and pandemic restrictions many European drivers are plying their trade on the continent. There is also a global problem of shipping container distribution that has its roots in the pandemic. The end result is that IKEA is having trouble keeping inventory in its British stores. This is occurring at a time when demand is up. When people spend more time at home, they spend more money on home improvements. Demand is up, supply is down, and you can’t get a mattress at an IKEA store. The wait might be weeks or even months.

I also read on the BBC website about a backlog of 85,000 pigs in Great Britain. The processing plants have a shortage of labor and are refusing to take pigs until they catch up. At present the backlog is increasing by 15,000 pigs per week. It won’t be long before farmers stuck with pigs that they cannot sell will be forced to destroy animals due to the costs of feed and care. It seems to me that this might lead to a bacon shortage, which seems to me to be a bit more serious than a shortage of mattresses. The most striking thing to me in the article about the shortage of workers in pig processing plants in the United Kingdom is that I learned a new word. Abattoir is another word for slaughterhouse. I didn’t know that word. An abattoir worker sounds like a much more impressive job title than hog butcher, I guess. With the shortage of labor, perhaps abattoir workers will see an increase in wages.

That is a strange thing about this Labor Day. Although there have been slight gains in wages in the past year, they nowhere near match the shortages of labor. If supply and demand is the reason that prices are going up in furniture stores, lumber yards and elsewhere, you might think that the shortage of labor would drive up wages. In many places around the US, however, wages have not kept pace with other costs.

From IKEA to abattoir, there is much to think of on this Labor Day. I guess the most important thing is for me to be grateful to the workers who provide the services that we need. We have been well served and supplied by working people. They deserve a day off. Happy Labor Day to all workers.

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