first off, the box arrived heavily damaged. this has happened with a few things from Walmart, and all those turned out fine. so I opened it. whilst 2 edges had some slight damage to them, it didn't really bother me being that it is a shoe rack and will most likely take a bit of a beating through the coming years.
from opening the box to recycling the box, it took me 25 minutes. the actual assembly time was maybe 15 minutes. for those of you that don't have a lot of experience putting together particle board furniture, let me tell you this was easy. here's how I did it:
put a small side panel on the floor, and insert the 4 wooden dowels;
put both large panels on the wooden dowels, and insert 4 more wooden dowels into the ends of these large panels;
put the other small side panel on the wooden dowels sticking out of the large panels;
insert and secure the screws into place (with the included Allen wrench);
carefully flip over, and insert and secure the screws into place
the directions clearly show this in an easy to understand picture