Comment by shimon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shimon | Hacker News Reader

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This is an interesting move, a design/manufacturing/retail company buying a labor marketplace company.

Ikea has grown a ton based on having widely appealing products at extremely low prices. Their growth over the past decade has been driven by expanding their physical retail presence on the one-giant-store-per-city model. The store build-out on this model may be done, at least in the US. Still, many potential buyers aren't willing to make the pilgrimage to Ikea because it's far, or simply because you can get an OK entertainment center at Target instead.

Key to Ikea's brand is the memorable in-store experience. If they can match that in their in-home shopping apps and in delivery/assembly/install services, they could grow significantly. If they believe this, expect them to leverage TaskRabbit not just to streamline delivery/install but to offer new Ikea-branded services. A few ideas:

* New apartment? Use our app to pick and place furniture, our designers to get advice, and our people to deliver and install everything.

* Remodel mockup services. Not sure how your kitchen layout will look? Have us block things out using cardboard boxes to you can walk through and feel it out.

* Organization & storage. Have someone go through your basement and inventory everything. Use our app to route each item to donation, resale, or storage. Once stored, app helps you find an item whether it's in your basement (shelf 3, bay 12) or retrievable by delivery-on-request.

> The store build-out on this model may be done, at least in the US.

It most definitely is NOT. For instance the nearest Ikea to the Raleigh/Triangle area is over 2 hours away.

There are 24 US states without a single Ikea store.

They have recently began a large wave of expansion [1] in the US. Raleigh (Cary) is getting one soon. So is Norfolk, Nashville, Jacksonville, Columbus OH, Milwaukee; they're also beginning to build second (or additional) locations in large metros like Chicago, DFW, Phoenix.

[1] http://www.ikea.com/us/en/about_ikea/newsroom/expansion_plan...

I hope they try more innovative stuff in their new stores. Such as making self-checkout the primary means instead of the alternative. The long lines are often a problem and a single row of the checkout machines has 4-6 machines vs 1 or 2 people run counters. So it would speed things up

They could even extend it to offer more services like ordering delivery and install services.

It also makes a lot of sense in their current system.

Ugh, the new, remodeled, Ikea in Seattle got rid of the self checkouts. Checking out now takes at least 15 minutes. Sometimes more. It's awful.

Any idea why? I've never seen a store add them and then remove them.

Actually, lots of stores are removing self-checkouts nowadays.

They tend to be a lot slower than cashiers, lead to more theft, and few people like to use them anyway.

Source? I've heard quite the opposite...

Edit: according to an international study theft increased from 1-2% to 4% but 60% of the people polled said they only stole it because the item wouldn't scan. This seems to be a technical and UX problem. There is a lot of room for improvement with the machines and from my experience it varies by store.

Otherwise 75% of people said it made their experience faster.

I wasn't able to find any evidence of 'lots of stores removing them' though...

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/bryanpearso...

> I wasn't able to find any evidence of 'lots of stores removing them' though...

IKEA is phasing them out in Germany, and all German store chains that had self-checkout have since removed them, or are in the process. There is not a single chain that is actively deploying new ones, or keeping them.

Strange, quite the opposite experience here in Canada.

Our biggest pharmacy (Shoppers Drug Mart) and dollar store (Dollarama) both with thousands of stores are going to be deploying self-checkouts soon. Various grocery stores and big box stores all over the city already have it.

Ikea only has 2 stores in the area so even if they remove it it won't be that noticeable in terms of deployment...

It may be Imea is trying more of a customer service thing for certain stores ala Amazon's focus on human interactions vs actual ROI or popularity.

Huh, that's surprising. Two of the three supermarkets near me have phased out cashiers almost entirely.

Same, my local grocery store added more machines after an initial phase and there are disproportionately bigger lineups to use them than the cashiers.

Not to mentioned Ontario, where I'm from, just passed new minimum wage laws ($15CAD/hr) and a bunch of retailers are responding by investing in self checkout for the first time.

That was the motivation as well when the 9€ minimum wage was passed here, too, but they've removed all of them since.

Cashiers are much faster than self checkout, and you still need to employ one person for every 4 self checkouts to prevent theft.

Around where I live, beside Walmart Superstores, those supermarkets that added some self-checkout have since removed them. Self-checkout is such an abysmal experience in supermarkets especially if you buy things like produce that I'll actively avoid any store that uses them extensively.

I have less of a problem in convenience-type stores but I'm usually not buying much stuff and rarely produce.

Maybe it's differing design of machines or something. The only time I'll use a manned checkout these days is if I'm buying alcohol. Otherwise, the automatic one is generally far quicker, and there are usually far more of them.

One of those frustrating problems that's already solved, but in pieces too widely scattered to do anyone any good.

Well, automated checkout with RFID tags is nowadays a viable solution, and first stores are deploying it.

They were trying to add a second store in the Boston area for a long time but they finally gave up on trying to get one into Somerville. (There was a lot of local opposition--mostly because of traffic concerns as I recall.) AFAIK, there's no current plan to add another store. The existing one is a fair ways south of the city.

I don't see how they could build something anywhere near as large as that store in Somerville anyway.

The Assembly Square project. But I think the traffic concerns were probably legit.

G

Still no Hawaii location...

They could double or triple their prices, and they'd still be much cheaper than the competition. :-(

The one is Columbus is already open.

Chicago has had two locations for like a decade now.

It may be that they have mostly saturated in the markets where they think they are competitive.

Perhaps. A lot of this boils down to the question of why they're expanding now and not sooner. Ikea stores are big investments and when they started rapidly expanding in the US they may not have had confidence in the long-term profitability of each store, including reliance on the housing market and taste-driven desirability of Ikea products. (What if Americans only saw Swedish furniture as a short-lived fad?)

Maybe now it's clear Ikea has a long-standing place in American retail, so in addition to expanding the giant-store footprint they want to invest in other forms of access.

i doubt it. i think america is just huge, and that they can't responsibly expand too fast.

remember, ikea is expanding globally. on my last vacation, i saw an ikea identical to the one by my house in california, in southern germany. that's really sort of unprecedented at the scale of an ikea store.

Ikea wants 2 million people within 60 miles of a store, apparently, though they've started experimenting with smaller stores in smaller markets.

http://blog.syracuse.com/at-home/2009/11/no_ikea_here_not_ev...

> remember, ikea is expanding globally

And they're expanding mainly with their own money. They're a family-owned company without outside investors. Ingvar Kamprad is pretty economically conservative.

>Their growth over the past decade has been driven by expanding their physical retail presence on the one-giant-store-per-city model. > If they can match that in their in-home shopping apps and in delivery/assembly/install services, they could grow significantly. If they believe this, expect them to leverage TaskRabbit not just to streamline delivery/install but to offer new Ikea-branded services.

Are you aware that IKEA is a multinational company founded in 1943 and the world's largest furniture retailer, and not an SV startup?

I suspect the ambition is less lofty. They know people use TR regularly to deliver and install Ikea furniture and they figure on taking a slice.

> Their growth over the past decade has been driven by expanding their physical retail presence on the one-giant-store-per-city model.

One? Hamburg (1.5mio ppl) alone has 3, plus several more within of 1h driving distance.

I think the parent comment was referring to how IKEA operates in the US.

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