Yep. The meatballs are very tasty, especially with lingonberry jam. A coworker said they looked good and I offered him one, but he didn’t because he didn’t know what was in it. Good thing, too. They contain pork, and he’s Muslim.
Does the one in Schaumberg, IL still have the seperate escalators for people and carts?
We were there once when some lady pushed her cart right down the pedestrian escalator. Luckily no one was on it at the time but it created quite a scene.
I assumed, erroneously by the looks of it, that the Ikea layout was legendary.
I love the IKEA maze, it’s one of my favorite things about the store.
The first time I went, I thought it was a brilliant idea and that all furniture stores, hell, every store everywhere should copy it. At other stores, when everything is spread out haphazardly, I’m never certain if I’ve seen everything or if there might be some corner of the store I’ve overlooked. At IKEA, all of the bookcases will be in the bookcase section, and if I keep following the helpfully placed arrows, sooner or later, I’ll arrive at the bookcase section. And by the time I leave, I’ll have seen everything they have to offer. If I don’t see a chair I like, it’s because they don’t have it, not because I couldn’t find it.
Some of their furniture is great and I’ve never seen anything that wasn’t at least functional. I’ve also never had problems putting it together.
I also love this site: http://www.ikeahackers.net/ of things you can do to ikea furniture.
While this is true, and after my first visit, I figured that out, I want to horsewhip whoever decided that it isn’t important to have people actually running their cash registers.
Every time I’ve been to an IKEA, I find waiting lines that are at least 4 people deep. Pull some of the people off of the floor already, and put them on the registers. There are 2 occasions where I’ve made it all the way through the store with items in hand, only to leave empty handed, because of the length of the lines to pay. There are many more occasin where I have gone to an entirely different store because I’m not willing, or don’t have the time, to wait.
Been growing up with it and loved it ever since. I’d say about 90% of my apartment consists of their stuff. IKEA in Germany has been around for a good while longer, so it’s not a novelty store by any stretch. (I remember loving to go there as a kid, because they had a little movie theater and a ball pool, which was awesome!)
Also, there are now 4 stores Berlin, so it’s easy to make going there a fun afternoon out. (Also, a hot dog and a bottomless drink for 1€? How do they do it?)
Also, the difficulty of assembly and/or missing parts seems to be a staple of stand-up comedians all over the world. I never really understood that, because to me all their instructions are clear, concise and yet work without a single word - astonishing!
As far as quality goes, when our first was born we bought an Ikea changing table, which was a set of shelves, a pillar, and a board. When the second kid was out of diapers we converted the drawers into a night table, which is still in use and works great - and our oldest kid is now 29. I have lots of Ikea cheap white bookcases, and my wife has an Ikea storage cabinet. Never a problem. And I’ve never had a problem assembling them either, but I do 3-D jigsaw puzzles for fun.
Probably depends on the time. I have an Ikea more or less on one way home from work, and every Christmas I stop in and walk the maze looking for kitchen stuff. My wife and daughter swear by their plastic cutting boards. On a weekday evening there has been almost no one there. The odd thing is that they are not very Christmas oriented, and don’t have later hours.
As for their food, I love their gravilox myself.
I think IKEA’s model is really geared toward picking it up yourself. They don’t want to deliver and therefore charge very high prices for it.
That being said, I love IKEA. I had heard about it quite a bit and was really excited when the Bay Area one opened. I knew what it would be like going into it the first time simply because of all the buzz around it. Now that we have one less than 10 minutes from our house. We sometimes just go there to hang out.
Love 'em, and not because of their furniture.
When the store in DFW opened, I dragged my brother and a couple of friends with me. In the parking lot, on the way in, I tripped and royally twisted my ankle. All I wanted was a baggie of ice, some paper towels, and some masking tape so I could cobble together a cold compress, but they actually had a guy on staff who was in charge of first aid for the customers.
I got a proper coldpack and Ace bandage compress, and the incredibly cute first aid guy put it on for me. Talk about service! [sub]And long term mocking from brother and friends for my display of complete and total clumsiness.[/sub]
It did as of October.
I like IKEA. They’ve got some decent, relatively cheap furniture and I like their design.
The “maze” is obviously a trick to make you walk past damn near everything in the store, and I don’t really like it, but it probably works for them since they use it everywhere. Once you know that the quick route probably isn’t going to be to follow the arrows on the floor, you can generally find short cuts fairly easily - they do have signs posted. If you know where you have to be (probably not the first time you’re in one of their stores) I find I can go in and get stuff in less than 10 minutes; not bad for a store of that size.
I love Ikea, but I love it for what it is, not because it could be all things to all people.
It’s a place to get attractive (if that’s your decorating aesthetic, of course!) inexpensive assemble-it-yourself furniture that is several steps above the assemble-it-yourself stuff you can get at Target and Walmart. I’ve put together a lot of furniture in my day, and I can attest that Ikea furniture assembles so much more smoothly than that from any other company I’ve ever encountered. Is it perfect? No, I’ve had a very small number of problems over the years, but they have been minor and Ikea remedied them without any hassle. E.g. we had our bed delivered and it arrived without the hardware packet, so we had no screws and dowels and whatnot. The customer service rep had a new packet overnighted to me at no charge. Another time it took us20 minutes of extraordinary effort and creative tools to remove a dowel (that we had put in the wrong hole because we didn’t read the instructions, ahem)
It’s not heirloom furniture. If you avoid the cheapest of their items, what you’re buying is stuff that will go together easily (if you can read a diagram and have a helper), be sturdy for many years, but which you generally can’t move. If you move Ikea furniture to a new apartment or house, it is never as sturdy and stable as it was to begin with.
I can understand people being frustrated by the layout of the store if they’re not there to browse. We treat an Ikea trip as a day-long outing. Browse the showroom, split meatballs and a shrimp salad for lunch and discuss planned purchases, do the marketplace, pick up any warehouse items we need, then go home. I don’t know how well I would deal if I needed to be in and out quickly.
Used to love it, now I just I like it and regard it fondly. It’s still fun to go and take a look at all the displays and pick up some meatballs and lingoberry products, but their products don’t really have a hold on me the way it used to when I was in college.
Some of their cheaper products that I used to love have terrible product quality nowadays. I have two plastic laundry baskets from IKEA that I bought in 2006 or so and when I went to go and pick up a few more last year the plastic that they used felt much thinner and oily. Their higher end products haven’t changed as much, but now I don’t mind spending an extra $50-100 for much better products elsewhere.
IKEA will always have a place in my heart though, for being the place that supplied most of my college furniture. Plus, our house is still full of products from IKEA that were bought years ago and managed to survive several moves. I joked with my college roomie that when she comes to visit me later this year, she’ll get to reconnect with some of the furniture that I had taken with me after I graduated.
IKEA is exactly the furniture-shopping experience I want. I like the aesthetic and I like walking around looking at stuff undisturbed by salespeople. I like picking out the piece I want and I like assembling stuff myself.
Aside from my Anthro computer cart (also DIY assembly) my apartment furniture is all from IKEA.
Usually, I get a catalog in the mail and note specific items to check out in person. Speeds things up a bit.
Overall I quite like it, but then I wanted clean, modern stuff for my living room, and found a sofa, coffee table and two large bookcases there that fit the bill nicely. Have had 'em for years and they’re holding up well. As someone said, though, they’ll never be family heirlooms.
They’re good for office-type stuff as well. I’ve lost count of the number of tables I’ve made with a flat surface from wherever and some of their bolt-on legs.
The store design is intriguing (I know all the shortcuts through the Maze at my local outlet) and a lot of the accessories are really well-designed and good value. I feel their textile items tend to look shabby fairly quickly, so I stay away from those.
Their loss-leader stuff tends to be fairly crappy, but what does one expect for, say, a 15-buck chair? Stay with the higher-end stuff and you’re fine.
Lastly, as someone else said, never go there on a Saturday afternoon if you value your sanity.
My wife loves it and we go to the one north of Austin Texas on occasion.
As for me… well, let’s just say that it’s MrsT that always suggests going to IKEA. If I’m going to buy a DIY bookshelf, there’s no need to drive 180 miles (round trip) to do so.
According to their website:
I wish they had one in or anywhere near Memphis. It sounds like something I’d enjoy. My daughter went a few times when she lived in Texas and she has a few cute lamps and paper lanterns I like. The lanterns are the same price now as they were five years ago, but to order them online and pay for shipping would double the price.