IKEA's shopping malls arm plans U.S. entry in major play

The one in Atlanta is next to Atlantic Station which is a large business and residential development with rapid bus transit. It is also near Georgia Tech and Midtown though to get to Midtown you have to cross the highway which is not bike/ped friendly.

Yes. They don't go into a lot of detail, but I suspect they will look at all existing IKEA stores and selectively expand/convert some of them into mixed-use spaces. In particular, I can see them offering, say, 'satellite' office space and meeting rooms in certain suburbs near high-density areas -- for people that now want to work remotely but don't necessarily want to work from their own home every day.

DC Metro has 2 Ikea stores. One in College Park (inner suburb on the MD side, just outside the Beltway). And one in Woodbridge (outer suburbs, a fair hike south in I-95 in VA).

I've never visited the MD location. The VA location is in strip-mall hell.

I have mixed feelings about mixed-use development. In theory, it's great - put shopping, dining, work, and homes in one place. Reduce driving, make walking/cycling possible, etc.

My problem is the way the US approaches mixed-use continues to be at a "larger than human" scale. It's not organic - it ends up being super-blocks developed in one go by a faceless developer. The common spaces tend not to be used - they look good in architecture drawings, but don't work well in meat-space. And parking lots are still built, which creates a Potemkin Village effect (multi-story garage surrounded in fake building facades, etc).

I'm probably just missing it, but where do you see that in the article? From my reading of it these new "malls" in the US are going to be in dense areas, separate from regular Ikea stores.

It does not say they will be extensions of existing IKEA stores.

I do notice this with a lot of things in the US. It looks like it's either super expensive stuff that looks great anywhere and is usually targeting upper middle class/elite, or tacky, tasteless crap on the other side of the spectrum. There's almost nothing in between.

I think for as long as I can remember, home goods/furniture has always been on the top floor of most department stores like Macy's.

Ikea's shopping malls branch is planning to enter USA. This is a major play.

P.S. Kudos to Reuters for a proper tracking opt out UX!

The division of the "IKEA Corporate Family" that runs shopping malls is planning on opening malls in the US.

How about something more clear like: "Ikea to open shopping malls in the U.S." The details can be in the opening paragraph...

Thank you for introducing me to that site..

Not sure what I'm looking at...

Indeed, curious how this will work out in the long term.

How will they evolve? Doesn’t IKEA also sell food items? Wonder if they’ll expand and go into groceries, and compete with Amazon/Whole Foods and Lidl?

If you look at what they actually own, they're just normal malls. It looks like the buzzwords are just that-buzzwords

Only the poor pay taxes. I used to work for a company in Sweden owned by Nestlé. In our monthly all hands meetings our CFO would always present 2 sets of numbers, one where it showed our financials without licencing fees. This would show an about 5% margin, pretty healthy for a food manufacturer. This was shown to us so that we wouldn't be so depressed. Then it was the numbers with licencing fees. Theese would always show a margin of about 0.01 percent. We where taxed on the 0.01 percent. The rest would go to Nestlé where they would pay no tax at all because the canton in Swizerland where they where registered had no tax on licences.

That someone would need to understand tax law in the Netherlands and Lichtenstein. It's possible that in those jurisdictions, this type of corporate arrangement is very much within the spirit of the law. Hopefully a European expert chimes in.

A comment above states that IKEA is very much a for-profit operation. I don't quite understand that. Whether an organization is for-profit or non-profit, they are all businesses in the sense that the cash-in must match cash-out. Most American hospitals are non-profits, but look at the way they conduct operations. Some for-profits receive grants from foundations for doing work that would be considered charitable.

The only real difference between non-profits and for-profit corporations is that the former do not have shareholders. Both types of organizations can still issue monstrous bonuses to employees and offer performance-based compensation (commission for donations generated, etc). But it's only with a for-profit company that the owner(s) can sell the company, or pieces of it.

same as insurance companies (like Blue Cross Blue Shield), or asset managers (Vanguard) are nonprofits, yet still manage to make a nice profit for people involved.

When your income crosses certain threshold, it makes sense to spend hundreds of thousands on consultants for tax planning, optimizing, etc, usually staffed with former tax auditors and lawyers

Netherlands, Switzerland, and Lichtenstein - the usual suspects. Wasn't Netherlands among the countries against so called "Corona bonds"? Here it goes the EU solidarity...

It would be neat to have something downtown on State street. IKEA has stuff that isn't as big as say furniture, and could be hauled on the CTA.

However my thoughts were more along the lines of the very near suburbs, where there's a fair amount of vacant properties.

I don't know how well things are going at the Lincolnwood mall, on Touhy and McCormick Ave, just on the border of the city. Carson's just closed, and the Room Place furniture store has moved in. There are a handful of underperforming malls on the outskirts of the city, and it would putting an IKEA would definitely drive of traffic and make it more attractive.

Do IKEA deliver in the US ?

There’s a small scale IKEA already in NYC. It’s situated uptown in a relatively high priced area and likely because of that, somehow the furniture and decor looks much nicer. I think it’s the same furniture but somehow through some well planed interior design it just looks nicer.

> Does IKEA do smaller-format stores anywhere?

In central Paris, there is one: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ikea-france-store/ikea-op... - I'm guessing it is slightly experimental.

Also, the Ikea In Vélizy (southwest suburb of Paris) only has kitchen & bathroom. It is smaller than a standard Ikea but not city-center small.

There are "city Ikeas" in several places, at least Hamburg, Coventry, and Taipei. It's pretty recent though.

Not necessarily. Ikea furniture has the principal advantage of being sized for the spaces you'd commonly find in cities. Typical furniture from a US furniture store wouldn't fit in my apartment. My Ikea "bedroom set" consisted of under-bed storage and a bed frame with slats. And my couch had enough storage under it that I kept all my hiking equipment in my living room. It was fantastic.

Central Rome has smaller format store which mostly has kitchen stuff.

There used to be a small IKEA on the high street in central Uppsala (Sweden) in the late 1980s, and a larger one outside the city. The small shop went away around 1990, no idea why since it's a university town where everyone gets around on bicycles.

Enough said that their money own the tax, audit, and contol authorities in dozens of countries around the world.

Agreed. There are a few (very few) cases where in-person still wins heavily; clothing, for instance.

Are there any malls out there run as a co-op between the businesses within, rather than as a separate business that leases space out?

I mean, how well has that worked out for the Macy's furniture division?

What is the difference?