Given that sometimes the only way to tell that an Ikea item is defective is to open it and try to put it together ("Hey, these holes don't line up, and that board is warped..."), a requirement to be unopened an unused would be ludicrous.
I love the Ikea pieces we have. As someone else said, they're far better than other put-it-together-yourself pieces I've ever bought. However, quality has been flaky. I bought 4x of a shelving unit (Trofast), and two of them had a single piece where the holes were not aligned correctly. (The first one, I thought maybe it was just me, but it was clear after putting together two more that #1 and #4 were defective.) Fortunately, it was a different piece in each, so I was able to cobble together three pieces of furniture and return the fourth.
They were very gracious and allowed me to return it despite the defect being only something you could tell when you actually tried to put it together. Since I was there with my kids, I would have been extremely unhappy had they asked me to demonstrate its failure. ;)
> Given that sometimes the only way to tell that an Ikea item is defective is to open it and try to put it together ("Hey, these holes don't line up, and that board is warped..."), a requirement to be unopened an unused would be ludicrous.
Judging from the wording of tormeh's comment, and if the regulations and customs are similar where s/he is located to those here in Sweden, unopened and unused was meant to refer to cases where you actually CAN return stuff no questions asked, such as when shopping through mail order or online (sometimes stores give you this opportunity anyway, but it's not something that's required by law or ubiquitous). It's not a given that you can always buy something, try it out and then return it if it's not explicitly stated.
If you're returning something because it was obviously defective when you bought it, then naturally it doesn't matter if you've opened the box.
I love the Ikea pieces we have. As someone else said, they're far better than other put-it-together-yourself pieces I've ever bought. However, quality has been flaky. I bought 4x of a shelving unit (Trofast), and two of them had a single piece where the holes were not aligned correctly. (The first one, I thought maybe it was just me, but it was clear after putting together two more that #1 and #4 were defective.) Fortunately, it was a different piece in each, so I was able to cobble together three pieces of furniture and return the fourth.
They were very gracious and allowed me to return it despite the defect being only something you could tell when you actually tried to put it together. Since I was there with my kids, I would have been extremely unhappy had they asked me to demonstrate its failure. ;)