The $30 Chair That Proves Big High Chair is a Scam

One piece of baby gear I wasn't tricked into spending too much money on

Welcome to Did It Work?, a semi-regular feature where I talk about something we bought or tried with our baby, and whether or not it worked. Today’s subject: the Ikea ANTILOP high chair.

Like almost all first-time parents, I feel strongly that I have no idea what I’m doing probably 80% of the time. When my daughter was a newborn, that number was more like 95% of the time. (Reality disproves this insecurity, as if all parents truly had no idea what they were doing, the human race would not have survived this long.)

The baby gear industry relies on this insecurity to sell us shit that costs way more than it should, or, in some cases, is entirely unnecessary. Fearful of the warnings I was issued about babies sometimes just randomly die in their sleep, I rented a crib that cost more than my bed frame because it advertised itself as slightly reducing the chances of SIDS. I spent hours reading about what car seat is the best, out of all of the good car seats. I have so many pairs of small thumbless mittens that I bought to keep my infant daughter from scratching her own face and she wore them zero times, and scratched her face zero times.

As I was in the thralls of researching high chairs, I stumbled across something that broke the “spending a lot equals you love your baby the most” spell insidiously cast by the Baby-Industrial Complex. It was a high chair that looked almost exactly like other high chairs that cost hundreds of dollars, but cost $30 and was available at Ikea.

I could not pronounce the name correctly with a gun held to my head, but the ANTILOP chair works exactly how we need it to work– for now, at least. There’s no hardware. Putting it together took a matter of seconds.

The $30 high chair is function over form. It comes in one color– hard white plastic with spindly silver legs metal legs and grey safety straps that dangle below the seat when unfastened– but it also avoids that baby gear design trap where a lot of it looks like it was made to have the same look and feel as a pair of gym shoes from the late 1990’s. (I suspect that some of the athletic shoe design choices in baby gear are driven by a desire to project a level of design and tech to justify these things being incredibly overpriced).

Not to brag, but I’m pretty sure my daughter is among the top 5% messiest babies when she eats. We’re doing this thing where we don’t spoon feed her ourselves; we try to encourage her to load the spoon and bring it to her mouth herself or give her finger foods that she can maneuver given her developing manual dexterity.

It sounds very highbrow in theory, but in practice this results in Juniper getting her food absolutely everywhere. She gets food on the walls, on the floor, all over her head and torso, in my ear, somehow, and in every conceivable crevice on her high chair on a daily basis. Another reason to love the cheap little high chair is that it could not be easier to clean, even when in a state of exhaustion. In a desperate situation, I could drag it out to the yard and hose it down and let it dry in the sun. (Can’t believe I didn’t come up with this idea before.)

Do I sometimes pull up reviews of the mega-fancy, adjustable Scandinavian-designed grow-with-me chair that costs ten times as much as this little high chair and looks like it would be at home in the Met Museum furniture exhibit and picture it looking perfect next to my dining room furniture? Absolutely. Could I justify spending that much money on something that I love when there’s something so much cheaper? (In this economy???) No.

So: does the Ikea ANTILOP high chair work? Yes. And since it’s by far the least money we spent on a major piece of baby furniture, it comes with the added bonus of making me feel good about making an economical choice in a world of upselling.

Image via Shutterstock