Beijing loves IKEA -- but not for shopping | Hacker News Reader

Beijing loves IKEA -- but not for shopping

latimes.com

50 pointsadamhowell27 comments

IKEA has the added challenge of copycats. Brazen customers are known to come in with carpenters armed with measuring tapes to make replicas.

Wow. That's a great indication of how different the Chinese economic landscape is: it's cheaper to hire a carpenter to build you furniture than it is to buy it at Ikea.

Obviously IKEA needs to open a factory there.

Because IKEA is a global brand, they need to maintain safety and pay standards that wouldn't scandalize their Western customers, which is why their Chinese factories can't produce for the same prices as local competitors.

Why couldn't China maintain a higher HR standard?

Obviously IKEA needs to charge an admission fee :)

When I first went to the IKEA Shanghai a few years ago, I was frustrated at how difficult it was to shop there. IKEA is setup to make you walk through the entire store. There is not shortcut to get to the checkout.

This problem becomes enormous when 90% of customers (lots; imagine christmas time mobs of people) are walking around as if they've just arrived at Disney World. Your trying to shop. They're casually strolling about getting in the way. Its a painful and slow shopping experience.

In IKEAs I have visited in Germany there are usually a few shortcuts. I wonder why there are no shortcuts in Shanghai.

Maybe the solution is for IKEA China to become a cafeteria company. IKEA has to spend the R&D for developing furniture for their other markets anyway. So just ship the most radical and funky looking stuff to China (which would be mostly pointless to copy anyway) and set up a different lunch bar every 20m or so.

They could offer all the cuisines of northern Europe, seeing that the average Chinese person doesn't ever gets to travel and would've never gotten to taste any of it. As a kid I loved the swedish meatballs and german sausages the other kids brought at show and tell. My Asian parents just couldn't cook that stuff.

Expanding the cafeteria seems like a no-brainer. And if they can't do that, they should raise the prices. Any time you have more customers than you can handle, classical economics says to raise the price. Doesn't have to be by much. Has the side effect of (maybe) making the store less appealing to those who are least likely to buy the furniture.

Raising cafeteria prices too much would lead more people to bring in their own food. I see that happen at places like Starbucks, and even McDonald's as it is.

I would assume they are making more than one copy.

"it's cheaper to hire a carpenter to build you furniture than it is to buy it at Ikea."

I don't think so. They rather take the design and produce and resell their own version.

I don't know about carpenter rates, but it's cheaper to get a custom-tailored suit than to buy a factory-made name brand.

"I see you every week in this mall. I don't like you shiftless layabouts. You're one of those fucking mallrat kids. You don't come to the mall to shop or work. You hang out and act like you fucking live here. Well, I have no respect for people with no shopping agenda. " -- Mallrats

I see no reason to suggest that this behaviour is somehow unique to the Chinese/IKEA combination.

I see no reason to suggest that this behaviour is somehow unique to the Chinese/IKEA combination.

I see the article as a pretty decent reason, actually. Journalists are lazy -- if they could write this story about Dallas or Detroit, they would.

Detroit mallrats don't make as interesting of a read, but definitely the behavior here (sleeping in a store bed) is a whole new level.

I'd say there is a pretty substantial difference between teenagers doing this vs full-blown adults (with adult responsibilities and adult powers) doing this.

The brand awareness is great, but the question is, how do we get people to open up their wallets and spend money?" said Linda Xu

Ikea China is like a dot com company! :)

At least they're not using Ikea as a substitute for welfare:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/1,1518,392850,00.html

I'm guessing this doesn't hurt IKEA much. When time will come for those people to change furniture, there's little chance they'll go somewhere else. And even in such a visit they will leave money for food, drink and small purchases. Overall it's worth the extra customer. They don't even form large queues.

It hurts Ikea about as much as people looking in the window of Porsche/Rolls-Royce/Bentley showrooms harms those companies.

So Ikea is seen as the aspirational symbol of western luxury by people in a country with a billion people and the fastest growing economy - tough problem to have!

Reminds me of the people in India who pay $4 to sit in an airplane that goes nowhere just for the experience.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1675373,00....

Jesus H. Christ. Thanks for the link. (feels vaguely guilty for having been lucky enough not to have been born a poor indian villager)

I live just down the road from a parked-up Concorde that people pay to go and look round and sit in. In England.

Interesting that such a thing exists, but it's hardly the same! Hell, I'd probably visit that, I loved Concorde, and love planes (and all vehicles really) in general ..

Law of unintended consequences strikes again. ;)

Well, these people even enhance the IKEA "experience": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=770127

Reply on news.ycombinator.com