Ikea (Shop)

Ikea is one of those places that inspires deep feelings amongst consumers, and they are definitely feelings at polar opposites. Even those who adore many of the products and are big fans of the prices, such as my husband, nonetheless suffer large bouts of angst when a trip to Ikea is mentioned. Firstly because there are so many little inexpensive things in there that by the time you go through the maze to reach the check outs, you just might have ...
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I LOVE the Ikea shopping experience. I am the sort of person who if she goes to a shopping centre, will spend literally all day browsing the various shops, comparing prices, window shopping, having lunch, and then going back to the first 5 shops and purchasing 1-2 items from each of them. At the end of it, I feel exhilarated. I will have seen everything there was to see, and then served myself by getting the best bargain, and had a day out ... more

Ikea is one of those places that inspires deep feelings amongst consumers, and they are definitely feelings at polar opposites. Even those who adore many of the products and are big fans of the prices, such as my husband, nonetheless suffer large bouts of angst when a trip to Ikea is mentioned. Firstly because there are so many little inexpensive things in there that by the time you go through the maze to reach the check outs, you just might have a whopping bill, and secondly, the maze itself. Being forced to wander all the way through a store past all its offerings, before at long last getting to where you can actually purchase the larger than a cuddly toy sized goods, but have to get them yourself from the warehouse shelving, and then on past the plants and last minute teasers to get to the check out, is nightmare inducing to my man, who absolutely loathes shopping at the best of times. On the other side of the coin you have people like me.

I LOVE the Ikea shopping experience. I am the sort of person who if she goes to a shopping centre, will spend literally all day browsing the various shops, comparing prices, window shopping, having lunch, and then going back to the first 5 shops and purchasing 1-2 items from each of them. At the end of it, I feel exhilarated. I will have seen everything there was to see, and then served myself by getting the best bargain, and had a day out to boot! I know lots of women like me who are like this, and even a few blokes. Strangely enough, they too are big Ikea fans, and so it usually with one or the other that I flit off for the "Ikea run". The appeal to such shoppers as myself is that it is like a large department store and you already know what the cheapest price shall be....you went for your free coffee first thanks to your Ikea Family card (free membership) and browsed the catalogue, making decisions on what it was you came to look for. in terms of price and need. Armed with this, you re then free to wander the maze, looking at all the little rooms they set up as examples, decrying their choice of colour or taking notes on something you like for later, and always, always, always keeping your eyes peeled for those little baskets filled with the small stuff you are after that they seem to scatter somewhat randomly throughout the store .Grabbing your prize, you continue along, taking it all in, stopping to examine the quality of that duvet set, and getting ideas for the next visit. Within a couple of hours, you find yourself in the warehouse part of the store, and you go and fetch for yourself anything largish you came for, and head on past through the garden furniture and plant section, possibly making a note to go ahead and take that detour into the bargain section. Then you check out, and at the end, find yourself faced with two choices. You can either make a run for it and get into your car after lading it precariously, or you can grab another cuppa for the road, again, free courtesy of your Ikea family card, in order to refortify yourself after the marathon. What I choose to do at that point depends entirely on how crowded it looks at the Food hall at the time. if its not teeming, I will usually nip in again and perhaps have some chocolate ganache too. I won't need lunch as I have a strict rule about Ikea...only go on a weekday that is Monday to Thursday, never during school hols, and always arrive before lunch. That way most people are at work, kids tend to be at school, and I can have a delicious lunch with my friends and children BEFORE going into the zone.

Many of you who have braved Ikea will no doubt understand what I am on about, and those of you who have never gone out of horror at the stories you have heard, let me put Ikea in a bit of context for you. Ikea is more than a furniture store. It has a lovely cafe that also sells food to take home, and is more like a an old fashioned department store in scope. You have your house wares section, where you can buy excellent quality kitchenware at rock bottom prices. Many of the items are hard to find or very expensive elsewhere, such as the lovely double boiler they have which is not even a quarter of the price I found a nearly identical (just the handle was different) one at a specialist kitchen shop for. Here I also have to bring up their glassware. I am really, really, REALLY funny about glassware. I hate thin stuff that breaks if you grip it too tightly or put ice in the glass, pour in the liquid, and then go to stir with spoon. CRACK is not a nice thing to hear when doing drinks. I also do not like overly heavy glass that is cheap and goes cloudy when you put it in the dishwasher due to poor quality. I also have a bugbear about glass that at first glance looks durable, is reasonably thick, but shatters if you take it out of the dishwasher hot, or set it down on a table firmly one day only to find you are bleeding into the remains of the glass and its contents from it deciding it was time to go to pieces. Price is another issue. I admit I do not like paying over the odds for things. A few months ago, in need of some decent drinking vessels of the glass variety, I went to Ikea. There I found the glassware to be of a suitably high quality, and the price was absolutely delicious. A mere 69 pence saw me with a boxed set of 6 lovely short glasses that were ideal for serving juice with breakfast, and a mere 59 pence each saw me with glasses that would do for me to serve beverages in ranging from cold milk, to iced tea, to hot lattes. The seeming quality did not let me down over the next couple of months over dishwashing either, and they look as pristine as when I first bought them, and as for sturdiness, well, I let my 4 year old use them at the table and we have not come a cropper. They are substantial in the hand, but not clunky. I found the same to be true generally of their other house ware products.

The rest of the store is set up so that you come across a et of display rooms on either side. Living rooms, dining rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, and even a tiny bed sit are all there for you to see fully furnished and wander in and examine the suggested products. The prices for the furniture is reasonable, and range from the utility quality, to fashion furniture ( get the look today at the cheap price, don't cry when you change the look next year, so not meant to last forever), to classic design ranges that carry a 25 year durability guarantee under normal use. They even have Lucite cases filled with mini testing equipment to demonstrate how they do their product testing. Be aware that though Ikea is often looked upon as a place to get cheap furniture, if you want the quality stuff, it is not cheap in the sense that you will not pay out, because you will. It is just that you will pay less than if you went to a higher brow type shop to get it, and no I don't mean some place like DFS!

I also would be loathe to say that their cheapy ranges of furniture are absolute cobblers either. When my youngest came along, his sister was only barely 18 months old, and rather dinky for her age, so still in the cot and nowhere near ready for a bed yet. We had intended to keep her in the cot until at least two anyway. He however, was long, and outgrew his basket quickly, and the rocking cradle we had was also getting a bit small sooner than expected, so we needed a second cot. Money was at a premium at that time, so off to eBay we went. Darn, no reasonably priced cots, and Mothercare et al were too dear. We needed cheap! Then I thought of Ikea. Their Sniglar cot with a mattress came to just over £52 and was solid wood. Off we went, and had a look at the display model. Hubby dabbles in making furniture, and he was impressed. Many of the expensive cots we had looked at in shops had bases that were little better than packing crate bottoms, and we even found staples in the slats on a couple of the display models. The slats on even the Sniglar model were smooth and regular, and quite sturdy, being sanded (which many of the big name cots' slats were NOT), and seemingly durable. The cot was unpainted and unvarnished, but made of solid beech, which is a decent quality wood and often used for kitchens as well as furniture. So, we bought one.

Our son would turn out to be hyperactive. BOING, BOING, chew , chew, bounce, boing, BOING! He spent 2 1/2 years in that cot before going to a bed, and despite it being a smaller than standard cot and him being tall for his age, he had plenty of room in it. It survived him completely intact, and one new mattress later, is now sleeping the step daughter's first child happily in HER nursery. It looks set to be able to sleep a few more children after her as well, and for the price, I can't quibble.Nor can I quibble over the customer service I got over the cot. yes, when we went to buy it, we had to follow the pathway within the store to the children's rooms section, look at the displayed nurseries to examine to cots, note the number and location down on the provided pad with the little Ikea pencil, and fetch it ourselves from the warehouse shelf, but nearly 5 years after purchasing the cot, and moving house, when it was needed for said grandmunchkin, Ikea gave excellent service over it. You see, we had tied the fittings to put it together into a bag, and tied it to the cot. Somehow, between the loft at the old house, and the loft at our new place, the handles of said bag were still there, but the bag and fittings were not! ACK! A look online told me that to ring customer services, I had to dial my local Ikea store's number. Right, I did that. I got a nice young man who answered after a VERY brief menu, literally within moments. he asked me what I needed, and I explained the situation. I fully expected to be charged for the replacement fittings, but he merely asked for my address and told me he was sorry it would take so long, but it would be 10-14 days before my parts arrived. They were sending me all new fittings for a nearly 5 year old cot for free. They arrived 10 days alter as he had promised, and were exactly right. not only that but they came airmail, from Sweden!Now THAT is what I can customer service.

Earlier on I mentioned the Ikea Family card. Ikea have a range of products, the Ikea Family range, and you save 25% off these items if you have the free membership card. You get this by simply getting a form from the stand, filling it in and stuffing the form in the provided box, after pulling the card off to use. That is it. You also get discounts on items throughout the store that they change from time to time, to reward members of the Ikea Family. The actual Ikea Family products tend to be consumables from what I could see, such as the washing up liquid I bought. It was a decent sized bottle and only 79 pence, and I was out, so I bought some. I have been very pleasantly surprised. I usually use the dishwasher , for eco reasons as well as the fact that most washing up liquids do terrible things to my hands. This stuff is tough on grease and grime, but gentler on my hands than Fairy. It is so gentle, I can use it to wash my own hands without having to moisturise after. I also saw bath stuff, ranging from salts to bubble bath and such. I definitely will be stocking up on these things the next time I go, as they are a fairly new range and I had ben previously unawares of their existence. Another boon of the card I also mentioned previously; the free cup of coffee. Do not underestimate this! You can get free hot chocolate, cups of tea, or coffee with the card. There is something soothing about having a nice snack or lunch and then having a relaxing drink after the shopping trek before heading home.It's free, so take advantage of it, and find yourself surprised at how your frame of mind is restored after!

I can hear the tut tutters in the crowd here, clucking about their sense of being wronged at having to do any sort of self service at all! For you, I will enlighten the masses about why this is. You see, for all its pretensions of being a department store, it isn't quite. Think of it as a hybrid between a department store and Costco. Bulk goods, low prices. The concept of the store becomes clear too should you look at the man behind Ikea. You see, Ingvar Kamprad was a 17 year old boy, who began using a shed on the family farm to store small goods such as whisks, saucepans, and stockings through a small mail order catalogue he produced and distributed. He kept looking for small, portable goods he could sell, and soon his family were helping him manage his expanding business. He began to get enquiries about furniture, but this was bulky. Then came the idea for flat packing tables so that the legs could be attached by the purchaser. And so flat pack furniture was born.It was an idea copied by many, but at Ikea, it became an art. As the business expanded to such proportions that he had to open a store (in Almhurst, out in the middle of seemingly nowhere, but close to his home), he set up a department store, with room settings. In the beginning, staff did indeed do the conventional thing, and got the gods for the customer. Then something happened that caused this to be nearly impossible. People travelled for miles to his Ikea store. He had literally wall to wall people, who all wanted his affordable and stylish furnishings and goods. There were queues that made the day before Christmas at Argos look like a nearly empty shop. Customers were getting VERY angry at the wait times as staff hurried to fill their orders. It was then an employee suggested opening a self service area, so customers could just get it themselves without having to wait. It proved to be a success, and so it became the norm. The warehouse section is now self service in all the stores. If it is not on the shelf, they are sold out until it is restocked. Similar items are on the shelves by it, with picture cards, so you can still select an alternative if desired.

The success of his local store led to him opening them in other areas, and the fact that people happily travelled to do so, meant that Ikea looks for where they have the space , content that customers in the region will come to them. It has proved well founded, and the company continues to expand. Today Ikea has stores in 36 countries, as well as an international presence on the web, where the mail order business is expanding to home deliveries for many items, coming a full circle to its roots. Roots which are also bound in ethics.

The woods in Ikea products are from sustainable forests and ethically sourced. While the furniture is mostly designed in Sweden (though not always, as Ikea keep a look out worldwide for talented designers), the goods are made in developing economies. This is not to say Ikea use sweatshop labour. No, Ikea look to see what resources they have locally that will benefit the manufacturing process ethically, and then sets up Ikea manufacturing, using local labour at fair local wages. Fair local ages in developing economies, such as Russia and Poland and the like, means that the local economies improve, and Ikea employees are happy, loyal employees, which is also a tenet of the Ikea business. Ikea Family is more than a marketing gimmick, it is the mantra of Ingvar Kamprad who still owns Ikea and runs it with his family. The global expansion has meant that he has had to hire outside his blood family, but each person employed is considered family, from the worker on the shop floor, to the top management, to the customer. As he has said in documentaries about his empire, dressed in clothes that actually might be from the local version of Tesco, ambling through one of his stores unassumingly and pretending to be a customer, " Ikea is about families."

So, you might have to actually go to the warehouse section yourself, but it is not because they don't want to help you. Indeed, customers who have mobility problems or other issues can actually ask staff to assist, and they will, quite cheerfully. After all, you are at Ikea, so you just became family. 

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