Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Source: Wikimedia Creative Commons, Christian Koehn
it on the motorway. Surrounded by an obedient
legion of yellow and blue flags, the box-like store
dominated the skyline and made the council
houses that it stood next to look minuscule. Today,
I am somewhat less impressed with my home-
town's IKEA, but I am in no doubt of its
commercial significance.
IKEA was formed by Ingvar Kamprad in
Sweden in 1943. Since its inception during World
War II, IKEA has now grown to be the largest
furniture retailer and the biggest retailer of
wood-based products in the world (Dauvergne
and Lister, 2011: 34). It offers over 9000 timber-
based products to its customers and consumes
somewhere in the region of 7 million cubic metres
of wood per year (Dauvergne and Lister, 2011: 35).
With its 301 stores in 37 different countries, IKEA
is the example par excellence of the globalization
of timber retail. But IKEA is not alone when it
comes to the growing impact of big box retail on
global timber transactions. Walmart, Home
Depot, Kingfisher (B&Q), Staples and Lowe's are
all significant players in the global trade of timber.
In this section I want to consider the impacts
that big box retailers are having on the trans-
formation of the world's forests. In particular,
we see that the increasingly complex chains of
global timber supply are leading large retailers
to (often unwittingly) support the illegal felling
of ecologically important forest resources.
5.5.2 Economies of scale in the
contemporary timber market
At the heart of the economic model of large retail
companies such as IKEA, Home Depot and B&Q
is the principle of the economies of scale. The idea
of economy of scale is based on the fact that the
greater the quantity of economic products you
produce and sell, the easier it is to keep prices down
