This afternoon as I completed a presentation I let out a satisfied sigh and leaned back in my Ikea Joakim chair (http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/90096456) to get a good view and admire at a distance the tasteful and attractive background fades which are hallmarks of my Powerpoints.
And then with a giant crack I was spilled onto the floor knocking a glass of juice over my desk and carpet. I got back up and examined the chair; the ABS plastic body at the bottom of the seat had simply split clear in two and the metal “pedestal” the chair rests upon was completely detached.
It probably won’t go down as the insight of the year that Ikea makes some shitty furniture. But I figured at least some of their items were of reasonable quality, especially their $170 work-chairs which struck me as decently constructed. Certainly a $170 chair shouldn’t just catastrophically fail and dump the person sitting in it. I threw it into the trunk of my car (I need a chair to do any work) and drove out in the rain for 30 minutes to get to Ikea.
I was annoyed with the chair breaking and I wondered if Ikea could offer me one of their 99 cent houseplants as a token of apology for making bad chairs. I received no such thing.
I was offered an hour long ordeal where manager after manager refused to exchange the chair because I couldn’t produce a receipt. If I had wanted money or even store credit, I would find this eminently reasonable, but I simply wanted to replace my broken chair with another one. It took four levels of managers to find one that recalled after 15 minutes of heated discussion, “well, based on the color, it might have been from before we stopped offering the five year warranty.” Fortunately, some type of number confirmed that the chair came from some time in the first quarter of 2007 when Ikea still offered warranties instead of requiring a receipt for every exchange, and she agreed to exchange the chair for an identical model. Except the stocking computer (which I had checked before leaving the house) was wrong and there were no chairs available except for a banged up floor model. It wasn’t ideal, but I wanted a chair, so I accepted it in exchange for the broken one.
But here’s the point of the thread: Ikea now requires a receipt for every single return or exchange. I suspect that this is a rather cynical tactic on their end in realizing that many people don’t keep receipts, or even if they do tracking them down can require significant effort on the customers part and will likely do a lot to reduce the volume of merchandise they actually have to exchange. Which is unfair when those returns are made because their furniture broke.
It’s unfortunate step for the company to take. There’s not much left to recommend a company when Wal-Mart has better customer service than them. A policy requiring a receipt for literally every exchange and sticking to that policy, even for blatantly defective merchandise is simply beyond the pale. In all of my years of being a retail consumer, I can never recall a store refusing to exchange identical merchandise to replace ones with manufacturing problems, and Ikea just dove to the bottom of the heap by my estimation.
Did you check the weight requirement for the chair? I own several Ikea chairs, and I remember being surprised once that I was dangerously close to the 200 lb. weight limit.
I’m on record as supporting the need for receipts; some department stores and other retailers will take back just about anything, with no proof of purchase from that store. It’s annoying as hell.
But the reason that i support the receipt thing for some stores is that the customer often could have bought the item at any one of a dozen different retailers, and could then just take the item back to the store with the most lenient return policy.
But Ikea’s stuff is, in general Ikea’s stuff. You can’t just buy their funny-named furniture anywhere, so i see no reason for them to require a receipt. I guess part of their rationale might be that Ikea furniture often changes hand multiple times, especially among college students. But if an Ikea chair is promised to last for five years, then it should last for five years, no matter how many different owners it has.
I bought a chair (not Ikea) last year that had a 200 lb. weight limit. Only they didn’t bother to tell me that in the advertisement. Or on the box. No, it said it on the last page of the assembly instructions after I’d finished putting the thing together. Who the fuck makes a sub-200 lb. chair and sells it in the United States?!
Hell, I’m not even overweight! I’m a guy that’s 6’4"! How much do you think I’m going to weigh? I ended up keeping it because I do actually clock in at 5 lbs. under the 200 mark.
Two months later I was leaning back on it and quickly found myself on the floor with a broken chair, much like the OP.
I mean, damn! Is it so fucking hard to make a motherfucking chair anymore?!
It sucks that your chair broke and the staff was crappy, but at least you have an IKEA within 30 minutes of you… I have to drive to L.A. for the nearest IKEA (about 4.5 hours) to buy or return anything. The people in the L.A. area stores have always been nice and helpful.
If IKEA is bastardly for any reason it is because they have yet to put a store in Las Vegas.
Because if there’s one thing that sucks more than shoddy furniture and lousy customer service, it’s that they’re just not close enough to take advantage of! Am I right?
The reality is that there is NO way they should require a receipt for EXCHANGES. Ikea stuff is made by Ikea and there’s no doubt as to where it was purchased. If it’s a direct same item exchange, there should be no questions asked.
Now, I could almost barely see where they’d want a receipt for store credit or cash/credit back, that proves the length of time you’ve owned the product, and whether or not you purchased it on sale. Of course, Ikea almost never has sales and when they do, the sale price isn’t terribly significant; they’re deep discount already.
You’re right, the new receipt policy is a way to ensure people don’t bring things back because they’ve lost the reciept.
Admittedly, I tend to side with big businesses and their policies, they’re there to make a buck, but Ikea has kind of crossed the line here. There is no way your ordeal should have taken as long or been as much of a hassle as it was. That’s the kind of hassle I’d have a tendency to speak out about on forums and business review/rating sites. I’d be half inclined to write their corporate offices about the experience as well.
Ikea is just one of those stores you have to be careful at… they actually have some really good deals and SOME good quality stuff. I have their PAX closet system and it’s stellar and good looking. I’ve had it for 6 years, and it still looks great, like new. On the other hand, I had that same darned chair you exchanged and it also fell apart within a couple of years. You have to be careful about what you get from Ikea and have a trained eye to judge quality.
I like Ikea shit. I had a futon from them that lasted four years until my college roommate got drunk, fell on it, and broke one of the slats. Good times.
Ikea customer for life, or until I can afford nice things.
No, but they do have a “finder’s corner” (atleast the two stores in my area do), where you can by stuff with really tiny flaws for next to nothing. Often these flaws are entirely undetectable afterwards (especially since already assembled furniture, even if it looks perfect otherwise, is considered flawed and sold here). They will not exchange such furniture for any reason, and I imagine that’s part of the reciept-thing.
BTW - a common trick is to tape the reciept somewhere in the actual furniture, like inside a drawer or under a chair.
-Septima, university student and satisfied IKEA CUSTOMER
I hate them because they make you walk through the ENTIRE FUCKING STORE to buy anything and to get what you want you have to note down FIVE DIFFERENT FUCKING PART NUMBERS and when you finally negotiate the toddlers playing dodgems on the swivel chairs and the bastards spending TWO HOURS deciding whether the Ortgerronter matches their Pattelaeto and the INEXPLICABLE FUCKING MAZE OF TREES THAT FOR SOME REASON IS HIDING THE FUCKING TOWEL SECTION and you get to the MOTHERFUCKING SELECTION AREA you find that they’re out of ALL THE FUCKING PARTS YOU NEED EXCEPT ONE and you realise that you drove for a FUCKING HOUR and spent THREE HOURS IN CONSUMER HELL to buy a fucking METAL ROD and then you cry, inwardly.
I can see the point of the OP completely. However, my IKEA beef has nothing to do with that. It’s been almost 5 years and I still shudder at the thought today. My first trip to IKEA was with my fiance and some friends. Fiance and I were personally underwhelmed, but that was just us. However, on the way home (about 1 1/2 hour trip) is when my engagement fell apart. However irrationally, I blame IKEA. And I never want to go there again.
Twenty odd years ago I bought 2 chairs from Ikea. They basically consisted of two square frames that made each side and then you bolted in the back and the struts from side to side and mounted the seat in the middle.
Years later, the years largely spent “throwing” myself into the chairs, the pre-assembled sides began to lean. I took the chairs back to Ikea. Some guy looked at them and said, “They will have to be taken apart re-glued and re-assembled to be any good.” I asked how I could get that done. He simply said, “Leave it to me they will be ready in a week.” A week later I picked them up.
Years later, apparently still “throwing” myself into the chairs, I had brung them undone again. I took the chairs back to Ikea. Some guy looked at them and said, “These things are fucked, you couldn’t possibly repair them.” I asked whether Ikea still sold them and he replied, “Yeah I’ll go get you a couple of replacements.” So I went home with four chairs.
This was many years ago when the Ikea store in Sydney was far smaller and i went directly to the guys on the loading dock, not into the store. I have shopped ther regularly ever since and have two Ikea chairs within sight as I type.
They want a receipt to check (among other things) that someone actually purchased the damn thing in the first place. Shoplifting happens all the time. Oh, maybe a chair would be a little difficult to shoplift, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t break-ins at warehouses or dodgy employees slipping products out the back door for their friends and family, or shipping containers that are reported missing at the docks, or other means whereby things just fall off the back of the truck. Also, trying to institute a policy of receipts being required only for items small enough to shoplift would be a nightmare as people argue that “…the vase is too big to be shoplifted because it won’t even fit in my handbag, look, so why do I need a receipt?!”
Ikea may suck, but if you want to blame someone for these store policies that seem stupid and difficult, blame the dishonest people who made them necessary in the first place. Blame my ex-MIL, who returns small kitchen appliances that she’s won as incentive gifts from her party plan business for cash to companies with lax return policies, or blame the thieves that hit one of my employers interstate warehouses before Christmas and stole iPods and then began attempting to return them without receipts in the post-Christmas return madness, or blame the supplier who won’t accept faulty merchandise back without a proof-of-purchase even though it was clearly a manufacturing fault, thereby leaving the store out of pocket if they’ve already refunded the customer, or blame the customers who deliberately “lose” their receipt because they know the warranty has well and truly expired on the chair and they wouldn’t be entitled to a refund or exchange anyway, or blame the customer I had the other week who tried to return a “faulty” print cartridge without a receipt only to have it turn out that a) the cartridge wasn’t faulty, his printer was (so the manufacturer would have tested it, found it worked and declined the store a credit) and b) he bought it as part of a multi-pack so it cost him less than if he’d bought it individually (if he’d bought the three cartridges back individually and talked his way into a refund on each of them, he’d have made a profit).
It sucks to be the customer who is bitten by this policy, but there’s only one thing you need to do to avoid it - keep the receipt. Can’t you arrange a drawer, box or file where you can throw the receipts for any reasonably sized purchase in case you need it again? It won’t help this time, but it may help next time.
(Quick aside: as a native Swedish speaker, I’m having a lot of fun reading your pseudo-Swedish item names. *Freffen froofer * is my favourite so far. )
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