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Comment by hhs | Hacker News Reader

If interested, this gives info on Ingka Centres: https://www.ingkacentres.com/en/what-we-do

IKEA might be into something here. Inner city retail has been dying slowly, never really recovered from 2008 crisis. There might be an opportunity here opening up. I would assume that commercial real estate is cheaper now (and might be even cheaper in few months with COVID-19), and there is still infrastructure (public transportation, even parking lots) and demand for meeting place (for shopping or entertainment) in city centers. Curious to see how this is going to pan out...

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?

> Doesn’t IKEA also sell food items? Wonder if they’ll expand and go into groceries

They do have a cafeteria and then a frozen/dried goods area in all of their stores that I've been to. Selling perishables (e.g. fresh veggies) is a whole 'nother beast from selling frozen/dried goods and would be effectively trying to enter into an entirely new market.

Yes! We do sell food items and I can tell you that all these new touch points for meeting the customer will have food ... we need to be where the people are, online and downtown.

unfortunately it seems to be 90% corporate buzzwords and jargen so I still have no idea what an Ingka Center is. I'm pretty sure they are a building with, things in it...

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

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