IKEA’s Crimes Against Cartography
londonreconnections.com
londonreconnections.com
Evidently the author does not like IKEA…which is perfectly fine. They are free to go to Bed Bath & Beyond.
But to offer a counter perspective…I like IKEA. Sometimes we travel 90 minutes just to go hang out there and shop. It’s kinda fun and interesting and weird in a way that makes it different from ordinary shopping.
I’m not saying that they’re the world’s most virtuous company or should be exempt from criticism, just that it’s odd to accuse them of using war psychology to beat their customers into submission when a _lot_ of people really enjoy the experience.
Maybe 10 years ago, I bought an Ikea dresser for my bedroom and spent too much of a Saturday assembling it. At the time, I had some buyer's regret for not just having splurged on some expensive hardwood piece. But know what? It looks nice enough and does its job just fine.
And I have a couple modernish Ikea chairs in another room which look quite nice and are very comfortable.
I'm sure Ikea has bad stuff and better stuff and I only go every 2-3 years but don't really have complaints.
Ikea's was all sold out. Really well designed piece, folds up nicely.
All other folding outdoor dining sets are sold online only and have terrible reviews. Horrible horrible reviews.
It turns out the price point for dining sets is as follows:
1. Whatever random product Target is selling this year for $100
2. Random product at Home Depot, which probably isn't in stock, for $250-$500, quality unknown.
3. Reasonable quality well designed piece at Ikea for $500
4. Costco's $2000 set.
Ikea continues to success for very good reasons.
I had the same experience with a belt clip for a knife by CRKT. 25+ year old knife discontinued who knows how long ago, and they sent me replacement parts free of charge.
Good customer support wins customers, which I suspect is why many like IKEA.
For the moment. They are on the brink of bankruptcy. They may yet avoid it but it's gonna be close.
The “war psychology” resonates with me, but I can’t stand spending time in an IKEA store; the experience is draining and frustrating, while everything they sell is disposable, cheap, off-gassing melamine and fiberboard.
It breaks quickly, and you find yourself back at IKEA buying another cheap furniture piece.
When I was young and poor, I hated IKEA even more after wasting time and hard-earned money there.
Instead, I started buying used, high-quality furniture, made of natural materials, from second-hand furniture stores.
Just as affordable, more durable, more enjoyable to own, and I was able to sell/give it on when I was less poor.
They did open up the shortcut after a few months though.
I once broke my iPad at Ikea out of tiredness (put it on an instable shelf while arguing with my partner).
It’s designed to make you tired, to make you argue with your partner, to make your kids run around and want things, and to make you slow down when you need to finish quickly. Ikea is designed to give you, in fine, a bad experience.
Ikea sells plenty of real solid wood products, but even their mid-tier chip board book shelves last.
Ikea's light fixtures are also a good deal. Bonus that they don't use soldered in LED lights, which I've seen many cheap and even mid priced light fixtures starting to do.
Ikea's signature POÄNG chair, those things last forever.
Ikea is also often the only place that sells furniture with a clean look. At least in the Pacific NW of the US, my choices for furniture shopping are:
1. Ikea, cheap, quality ranging from meh to decent.
2. Macy's Home store and other of the ilk, horribly ugly furniture with quality ranging from decent to not too bad.
3. HOLY SHIT expensive furniture stores selling good looking stuff like CB2.
4. LOLWTFBBQ expensive furniture stores like restoration hardware, selling ugly ass shit that is of quality ranging from "not too bad" to "pretty good."
Last time I visited Vancouver BC I was very jealous of their furniture stores. :(
It's actually a shame they don't focus more on perfecting their offerings.
Some items get redesigned too often. Especially the melamine off-gassing stuff referred to by the parent post.
Agreed, last drawer I bought from them I shoved activated charcoal bags in for over a week and left the drawers open, eventually they stopped smelling.
Also the quality of their press board / chip board has dropped dramatically over the years. 20 years ago items in the Malm line were a lot heavier and could survive multiple moves. Last time I picked up a piece of a Malm bed, it felt nearly hollow.
My theory is there is some kind of fashion season progression for furniture, perhaps based on stuff they use on reality shows or trendy waiting rooms or something. That is the "cutting edge" designs (made nowhere particularly noteworthy and using nothing special in terms of materials) at repugnant prices.
I've been looking at Ikea for kitchen cabinets and while there are some shops that'll do comparable quality Ikea has most of them beat on price, drawer hardware, and ease of discovery. I was thumbing through one catalog that had a whole formula to figure out how much your cabinet would cost. With Ikea the prices are right there and they're generally lower than comparable quality RTA stuff from other brands. Plus the warranty is better and installation is less fiddly.
There's just not a lot out there that's just a little bit better than Ikea. There's Ikea and then there's high end stuff.
When the movers came with our container, I checked the dimensions on the actual IKEA bed we had bought in Singapore: It was smaller than the European version, and fit perfectly into the bedroom.
That particular chair I had was the same everywhere. I moved mine from Australia to the UK and got the new wheel there. Pretty sure it’s the same globally as I went to Shenzhen to visit a supplier a few years later and noticed the boardroom had very familiar seating!
(It was a ‘Markus’)
Things like tables I've generally felt to be of decent quality. Their kitchen fittings tend to be good enough quality to make it through their 10 year warranty.
Actually, speaking of warranties, I was just in an Ikea store in The Netherlands after moving here from the USA, and there was a large sign on the wall in the couch section proclaiming the 10 year warranty on all of their couches. So it seems they are trying to make some key products last.
I also bought some cheap plastic shelves with wheels for my new tiny Dutch bathroom. I don't expect the wheels to still roll in a year. I bought what I think it supposed to be a wire mesh "filing cabinet" (it's tiny!) to use as shoe storage in the entry way and I expect it to start rusting next year. But it was €20 and I just made an international move and money is tight atm.
You get what you pay for I think. $40 bookshelves? Not making it through a move. This model[0] however, will likely hold up fine. It looked sturdy when I saw it in the store last week.
0: https://www.ikea.com/nl/en/p/hemnes-bookcase-red-stained-lig...
They're not a cheap option, considering. I was looking at them a few weeks ago thinking I should either have spent more on something more robust or looked at options elsewhere.
As for IKEA's store plan, I've long suspected the really cheap products are loss leaders to get people into the stores. The majority of products - like Hemnes - are far more expensive but still budget-or-just-over quality.
And there are always a few items, like premium persian rugs, which are far more expensive than equivalents elsewhere. I expect IKEA makes most of its money from higher margins on the just-over products.
The wife wanted a bookshelf so we bought a Billy for €40. I was watching a couple YouTube videos about making them a bit sturdier with glue and extra nails, so I'll probably take a stab at that this weekend when I assemble it.
Re: loss leaders, of course! They serve a €1 breakfast (with "free" coffee if you're a member, which is also free) at the store nearest me. It's an egg, cheese, and a small bread roll. Not much, but I'm paying at least €1 for bread at the local café to go with my €3 latte. The cube shelves are ridiculously cheap and really quite sturdy for most models but you pay out the nose for the cloth cubes to slot into the shelf. Want a door and a drawer to fit in one cube? That'll be half the price of the full shelf.
I think the other half of the problem here is an ignorance of the business model and marketing by consumers. If you expect a €20 shelf to last forever, you're in for a bad time. If you're a college student or a young family starting out in life and need some stuff to get through the next few years, Ikea is probably a decent option.
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/newsroom/corporate-news/safety-an...
Ikea is providing longer, presumably stronger, pins free of charge.
In any case the 48 cm wide unit is listed as having a 15 kg limit per shelf, the 89 cm wide units are rated at 30 kg. Fifteen kilos of hardback books is potentially a lot less than one might expect.
I'm sitting next to a Billy that's nearly 2 decades and 4 moves old.
You can sometimes easily reinforce the weak parts, like screwing brittle backs of shelves on the main structure, with large repair washers else it doesn't hold.
In my experience used furniture prices are all about the local supply and demand. In some places, the prices are horrific for anything,p eople are selling cheap Ikea stuff on craigslist above retail. In other places, people are practically giving it away.
Personally, I like it every now and then, but it is exhausting, or expensive, or both.
Is it the best design? Of course not, but it’s one that you and most people can also afford at all stages of life including our high school and college years. in many cases it neither looks nor feels cheap. At the very least, it looks decent and is functional for a fair amount of time
The layout is fine for a mooch, if you go for 1 specific thing, it's terrible.
It’s also great because she can basically “do all the activities” at IKEA, she can see all the furniture, go into all the display rooms, and even the dining area is wide open and accessible.
She just turned four and her favorite part is the “turbo boosts” where I give her a good push and she careens down the aisles at IKEA, using her brakes to stop herself. Braking is a super important skill for a little girl in a wheelie!
This is not universally true! My local IKEA in Greenwich, London (built relatively recently) does actually have large panoramic windows on parts of the upper, showroom level. I think it adds a more modern and cheerful vibe to the place compared to other IKEAs.
I’ve also noticed they’ve gotten a bit better in recent years at signposting the “secret” shortcuts between sections, which makes things easier when you really do want to grab some specific items and get out quickly!
IKEA is a bit like Disneyland. You know where it is, you know it's just a place, but it feels weirdly magical and nostalgic. Even the smell is always exactly the same.
I wouldn't expect this to be in law, other big shops sometimes don't have a lot of windows neither.
Big shops are decorated warehouses.
Note: Some items require multiple boxes, from different bins. And sometimes only 2 out of 3 are in stock, even though though the website says there are 3-5 of each in stock.
In addition they don't put all the same things in one place in either place. They get sprawled. The idea is probably to make you buy something you didn't think of when you came in. But armed with a list, it had the opposite effect on me, especially when kmart exists :-)
Is it not like this in your local IKEAs?
Unfortunately there's no direct route between the entrance and the warehouse.
Part of the reason their stores are like that, is they prioritize the look and feel of the "space", rather than the look and feel of the "product", which, to me is great marketing for a furniture company.
When I go to an IKEA and walk around their showcase rooms, I imagine different furniture items in my own home, visualize their location and use and then make a decision.
Its actually a great experience. Also, in India, most of my friends and colleagues go to an Ikea with an expectation that they will be spending their whole day there, probably lunch there and go to a movie at the end, perhaps.
So the whole shopping experience is very very relaxed and if you have kids, a whole riot.
Its awesome.
I find what I want online (I'm not counting this towards the total time). I go to the store and walk in the exit, through the checkouts to the storage hangar, use the computer to look up which aisle my Knoppflogg (or whatever) is stored, pick it out and go.
Or rather, if you find yourself spending a long time in IKEA, confused by the layout, it's because that's how you've chosen to navigate the store. With preparation you don't have to.
It's also funny that they use TfL signage as the "gold standard", because tube stations do actually take you on longer than necessary paths (for better circulation at busy times I think, to try and avoid streams of people going opposite directions to clash, so it takes people going one way through a longer circuit to avoid it). If you know where to go you can actually take shortcuts at many stations and get out quicker.
It’s ikea, not a gas station.
You get suckered into walking the store when you just want to grab a couple small things like from the kitchen section and now feel compelled to just walk the rest of the way out.
One thing I do really like about them is their spare parts desk. You can get just about any piece of hardware for free. I had a bracket for my bedframe break that was several years old. They still sell the bedframe but I was unsure if they would help. They gave me a new bracket that was actually better designed to prevent how it broke for me. Same thing happened with a desk leg mounting plate. They had did not thread the hole for the leg to screw on so it was entirely unusable. They simply just gave me a new plate. No questions asked, no warranty periods, just make the customer happy so they come back and buy more stuff. A lot of our stuff comes from Ikea so I'm happy with my purchases. As long as you aren't too rough on it or try to disassemble it, it will last.
Then I take a note of the shelf numbers and walk right through the exit (!) to the shelves (at the end of the supposed shopping stroll). Takes me about 15 minutes usually.
I don't really feel that way. At least the Ikea I visit it's pretty obvious where to go if you just want to get X.
Here is a good trick: the fire department requires that stores post the floor plan near the entrance. I studied the floor plan in my local IKEA and I was able to find multiple new pathways that I never noticed before, saving me a lot of time.
I've worked on some IKEA advertising campaigns myself in the past, and have had colleagues and friends who work there, so I've heard enough 'back-story' to have other reasons to not like the company [0] but when caught in the seemingly endless labyrinth, I've behaved in exactly the way described in the article. Particularly annoying is how much extra stuff I buy just to avoid needing to come back some indeterminate time in the future.
[0] one example was their ruthless negotiating when encouraging developing countries to open production-factories in poor areas, so that local or national government would contribute large sums to the setup costs in return for an IKEA contract, which they would then just use until the contract expired and move on to the next desperate place.
Anecdotally, you can skip a storey too.
Not just by going through the closest shortcut but by not entering it at all. At least that’s what I did during my last visit.
you start off in the impulse buy areas, and leave through the bleak self-service areas. This doesn't jibe with the "ikea intentionally makes you tired to make you impulse buy" narrative
> Furthermore, because the layout is so confusing and oriented for one way flow, shoppers know they won’t easily be able to go back and get an item later. So they pop it into their large trolley and continue shopping.
I think Lidl does the same trick too.
By contrast, the process many other sites want you to follow is:
Select one of a meaningless list of made up names, presumably do they can apply price discrimination to you .
Select by colour. The least rational choice is the only one you are allowed to make using an efficient mechanism
Check the details of a long list of sofas until you find one that will actually fit your room
Fail, and go back and choose another random name.
(Ended up getting one from nabru rather than IKEA, whose website is not too bad either. They don't make it that clear but they actually only have 2 lines and everything else is an option, so you can get the exact sofa to fit your space if you ignore the silly branding section and use the design tool)
You can immediately enter ikea and go to the restaurant to eat reasonably priced food.
However, you can't go there to eat and then just leave.
The route from the entrance to the restaurant is a trap. The escalator is one-way, and the elevator has no button to get back down.
The only way out of the restaurant is down the stairs to the long shopping maze.
At my ikea that's true, but if you get on at the 2nd floor someone will inevitably be on the bottom floor to summon the elevator.
Is this a US thing?
That's pretty far out. McDonald's is not fit for any home, heck even any human. IKEA sells good stuff . They are functional and look OK. It's disgraceful to compare it to McDonald's food.
Their plastic products are made some quality of plastic that is too thin. They don’t break in my experience, but I question Why they are so thin to begin with.
Flat-pack is all about efficiently making it easy to carry in the car, and also trying to shove as many pallets into a truck or warehouse as possible. In a similar vein, much of what used to be glass or metal is now plastic, because it's lighter and thinner and you can use the space saved to pack more into a pallet.
The famous KALLAX shelves and MALM drawers are not solid wood but just because some of the their furniture is not doesn't mean all of it isn't
There are Lack tables for couple of dollars and there's a lot of good quality items. Pick what you need (if it has to last, it won't be the cheapest one on the display).
I don't disagree.
[1] https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/gtawiki/images/1/1b/Krapea...
Arrive when it opens, leave 10 minutes later.
I often go to IKEA to hang out in the upstairs cafe and work on my laptop. Getting back out is really easy. There is a very obvious (but unalarmed!) fire staircase near the cafe.
At the bottom of the stairs, there are obviously-marked and alarmed doors to the outside. But there is a set of unmarked non-alarmed doors that open to the ground floor near the main entrance.
I asked an employee and they said it was no issue as long as I didn’t use the outside doors.
For a company that have a revenue of 42 billion, I was expecting that there would be more stores. I guess the world isn't that big.
If my wife wants to enter the rats maze I treat it as a video game where the objective is finding and using all the camouflaged shortcuts and fire exits. The kitchen section is lava.
Mind games.
I'd like to see one of those airplane evacuation tests conducted at IKEA to see how well these arrows work, or whether the IKEA promenande is a fire hazard.
You’re always a section or two away from a set of doors. And they have the required red exit signs everywhere.
I was actually there when the alarm went off. The nearest evacuation route actually went into the back offices. Didn’t have any trouble finding my way out.
1) immediately go to the exit and get a soft serve, in it's the only thing that makes the place tolerable
2) near the registers are the computers to locate the flat pack stuff, use those to shop
3) get the item and check out
4) never go to the top floor showroom
What store do you think, “this is a completely no-nonsense customer friendly layout?”
(With the possible exception of multi-story stores, but maybe there isn't much you can do about that.)
A good contrast is Best Buy stores. I hate them so much. It's impossible to find anything.
100 vs 10000 product stores?
Louis Vuitton Boutique vs H&M store
Order online for pickup at the store.
Drive up to a parking spot right in front.
Click the link in the order confirmation email.
Note your parking spot number.
Wait 5 minutes.
Done.
a) when they don't actually have stock of something they just silently refund it and don't give it to you. When you're buying a bunch of small things like fixtures it can be easy not to notice that an important one is missing, which is even more infuriating when there's a clear and acceptable substitute to the missing SKU
b) You lose the opportunity to screen for clearly returned or damaged goods, which at least my local branch is rife with.
My alternative tip is to use the website (filtered to your store), where they tell you exactly what aisle and bay the product you're looking for is in.