50 Things That Made The Modern Economy with Tim Harford

Denver Thornton hates the Billy Bookcase.

He runs a company called Unflatpack.com.

If you buy flatpack furniture from anywhere like IKEA, but you're terrified by dowels and

alan keys and cryptic instruction leaflets featuring happy cartoon men, you can get someone

like Mr Thornton to come to your house to build it for you.

And the Billy Bookcase?

It's the archetypal IKEA product.

It was dreamed up in 1978 by an IKEA designer called Yelis Lundgren.

He sketched it on the back of a napkin worried that he'd forget it.

Now there are 60 odd million in the world, nearly one for every hundred people.

Not bad for a humble bookcase.

In fact, so ubiquitous are they.

Bloomberg uses them to compare purchasing power across the world.

According to the Bloomberg Billy Bookcase Index, yes that is a thing.

They cost most in Egypt, just over a hundred dollars.

In Slovenia, you can get them for less than 40.

Every three seconds, another Billy Bookcase rolls off the production line of the Yelensvans

Mervla factory in Shetelstorp, a tiny village in southern Sweden.

The factory is a couple of hundred employees never actually touch a bookshelf.

Their job is to tend the machines imported from Germany and Japan that work 24 hours

to cut and glue and drill and pack the various components of the Billy Bookcase.

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