Business Insider/Jessica Tyler
Assembly is required for most furniture bought at IKEA and Target.
- IKEA and Target both sell a ton of inexpensive furniture and home products.
- IKEA has more to choose from because its warehouses sell only furniture and home products, but with more than 1,800 locations in the United States, Target stores are more accessible.
- Assembly is almost always required for furniture purchased at either store. IKEA acquired TaskRabbit in 2017 to make the assembly process easier for shoppers, but Target doesn't offer a similar service.
- We shopped at both stores and found one of them was a better choice for buying cheap furniture.
IKEA and Target both sell plenty of inexpensive furniture, dish sets, towels, and home essentials.
IKEA warehouses are massive, and they offer hundreds of options to shoppers. Because it specializes in furniture and home products, it has a much bigger selection of those products than Target does.
But Target is a lot more accessible than IKEA - Target has 1,839 stores in the United States, and IKEA has only 56. Target stores are much smaller than IKEA stores are, and they're generally easier to navigate.
Most of the furniture each store sells is pretty basic, and it almost always requires assembly, no matter which store you buy it from.
To make the furniture assembly process easier, IKEA acquired TaskRabbit in 2017. TaskRabbit lets users hire temporary workers to deliver purchases, clean homes, and even assemble furniture. IKEA shoppers can hire a "tasker" from the TaskRabbit app and website or through an employee in-store once they have purchased the products.
Target does not offer a similar service.
To see which was a better place to find inexpensive furniture, we visited an IKEA store in Brooklyn, New York, and a Target store in Jersey City, New Jersey. Here's the verdict: