I call this the Spice Girl Effect.
I am very pleased with my Görniká, but a wheel came off my Resrîkämpø during an important moment. When I contacted customer service they arranged for a new wheel to be sent. Would buy again.
18 mos ago we bought a huge leather sectional sofa. It’s held up beautifully and is very solid.
They didn’t accept my debit card after standing in the checkout line for the better part of an hour. (It had a crack, but all other places accepted it for a couple more weeks after that.) Haven’t been there since.
I’ve only been to Ikea once, and it was not a very good experience.
We bought wooden dining room chairs. We grabbed the merchandise ticket, went down to the stock area, found the correct shelf where the chairs would be and…
There were only 4 chairs left. We needed 6. Their inventory said that there were six in stock, but the shelf only had 4.
When we flagged down a stock person, he was very rude and condescending.
“Did you look above, below, to the right and to the left of where YOUR chairs are supposed to be?”
“Nobody told us to do that.”
“Well, you should do that.”
So we did that and found more of the chairs on the shelf above and to the left of where they were supposed to be. They were too far for us to reach on our own, so we asked the same stock person if he could grab them for us.
“Oh well, I have 5 other customer orders I have to grab first. It will take about 45 minutes before I can get yours.”
“Do you have a ladder so we can grab them ourselves?”
Then he started making every excuse in the book as to why he couldn’t let us climb a ladder 4 feet to grab 2 more chairs. It was obvious he didn’t want to help us, let alone be there at all, so after he left, we found a chair nearby and I stood on it to grab the 2 boxes we needed. Then we had to wait 30 minutes to check out.
But it was all for nought. The chairs barely lasted us 3 years and they all started falling apart. Out of the 6 chairs we bought, only 1 is still around and it looks like hell.
No, I won’t be going back to Ikea.
Meh. I had an Ikea near me in Nanjing, and it was good for getting temporary stuff to fill my inconvenient Chinese house. It’s a pretty Western-friendly place with a lot of English-speaking employees. For example, we Americans use more than a single wok and set of chopsticks to cook, and so I needed storage and organization in my dining room and kitchen, so it was either Ikea (cheap and fast!) or B&Q (high-end and too expensive for a rental house).
I learned not to give my true opinion of Ikea after insulting a teacher of mine, who had thought that Ikea was high end and expensive. It turns out, that’s the general impression amongst the Chinese.
Here in Michigan I have an Ikea very, very close, but there’s nothing I really want or need there to fill my real home with. If I were 25 instead of 45, then maybe.
In both places, the Ikea “experience” sucks. I know how to find the shortcuts, but there’s not simple in-and-out, just want to grab a garlic press or light bulb ability. But I also tend to avoid shopping malls, and will often stop at the corner grocery and pay 5% more rather than contending with Meijer or Kroger.
Yea, all the way!
I’m never going to have good furniture in my house, partly because we have cats and partly because my wife likes to change things enough that high-priced items just don’t make sense. So, given that we want relatively inexpensive stuff, we can go with cheap crap that will break in a few months and looks cheap from day one, or better IKEA stuff that is not built to last, but will retain its good looks for its medium lifespan.
Someone upthread mentioned having to wait an hour for furniture to be retrieved from the warehouse. The IKEA stores near me don’t work that way. You wheel an annoying non-steerable cart through their warehouse and pick up whatever you need on your way to the registers.
I don’t like the maze store, though the shortcuts are nice.
The aforementioned non-steerable carts drive me crazy: they have 4 rotating castors, so you can push them in any direction. This makes it more difficult to push them where you want them to go.
Only other complaint? There are too few IKEA stores. Most people have to make an hour trip to get to one. It’s an expedition. Why can’t they replace a half dozen Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and Lowes stores with an IKEA? Heck, in my neighborhood they could dispose of twenty pharmacies that sprout up like Starbucks on every corner, and trade them in for one good IKEA. (no need to explain…if enough demand were really there, they would build more)
golf clap
IKEA makes a handful of furniture items that are okay in a utilitarian sense, and yes, their kitchenware is inexpensive, but I find most of their stuff to be poorly made crap that won’t survive more than a few years or a couple of moves. Then again, pretty much any furniture at that price point is going to be shitty MDF laminate. The one thing Imfind peculiar is that their attempts at mid-century modern-esque design are just wrong in off-putting and dysfunctional ways. As an example they have (or had) a compact kichen table in which the four chairs tuck neatly flush to minimize space when not in use; it’s a near clone of an Hans Olsen design, but instead of making the table round it is squared with rounded corners into which the chairs fit, which means when sitting at the table you are perched at the corner with minimal side space such that there is literally not room to lay a placesitting. It’s a terrible design, and because of how far out you have to sit it doesn’t even end up being all that compact in use.
I have a pine butcher’s block that I’ve used for a workbench, a couple of cheap wooden cross slat-sided storage cubes, and an entryway bench which holds shoes and (after adding some reinforcements) is pretty solid, but I’ve gotten rid of most of the other crap by giving it away or junking it. (After a few years and two moves, those BILLY shelves were just a crush hazard waiting to happen.) I get the appeal of cheap furniture and being able to wander around a store to get ideas, but I will never buy another piece of their crap furniture unless I need something quick and disposable.
Stranger
IKEA stuff is cheap, which is both good and bad.
Good : It’s cheap. You can buy many things at IKEA without spendiong a lot of money.
Bad : It’s cheap. Their stuff is not actually good.
There are no high quality items at IKEA. None. Absolutely every single thing you can buy there is vastly exceeded in quality by something you could buy elsewhere. IKEA is the McDonald’s of home furnishings.
When I was young and had to furnish a home with next to no money, IKEA was great. Now that I’ve got furnishings and want something good that will last on the occasions we need to buy something, it’s not even really on the radar.
I’ve got to say, I’m a bit surprised that, at this point, “meh” and “nay” have more votes than “yea”. Almost everyone I meet sings the praises of Ikea, I thought I was a lone voice in the wilderness. Still may be, in fact, but apparently not on this particular issue.
Oh, also, the penultimate sentence OP should read “never intend to go back”. Poor editing skills on my part.
Sorry, didn’t mean to insinuate that I was comparing the two, just that I was so disappointed in Ikea that I decided to look at other options. The thrift store turned out to be a better option in this case.
Actually, the few stores is totally part of the program.
It’s not that they don’t have enough demand for more stores. It’s that they’ve discovered that people are willing to spend a couple hours driving, and a couple hours waiting for service or to check out.
As long as *you’re *willing to spend *your *time=money overcoming inconvenience *they’re *not going to be motivated to spend *their *money providing the convenience of more nearby and adequately staffed stores.
The other thing is that making it an expedition encourages impulse buying. You see something shiny at your local corner store you’ll probably pass it up a couple times before finally maybe buying it. You see something shiny at Ikea that you only visit every couple months and it’s almost sure to come home with you the first time. By making it more difficult to get they make it irresistible.
The ultimate win in retail is to make your store into a tourist destination. For while Bass Pro or Cabela’s fell into that category. Ikea’s still succeeding in that in many areas of the US. As is Costco. Couple that with an approach that deliberately goes extreme Cheap Charlie on employees to maximize profit per store and they’ve got a very winning recipe. As long as the customers are willing to play along, unwittingly paying a lot for the money they think they’re saving.
I’m not willing to play. I also recognize I’m massively in the minority on this. I don’t wait for restaurant tables either. If you can’t seat me now there’s someplace else nearby I’d rather be.
Pretty much word-for-word what I was going to post.
I do still use Ikea for certain items though, where spending extra would be pointless. I’ll still happily buy glassware (drinking glasses, vases, water jugs), as there’s a pretty good chance all of these things will get smashed, chipped or cracked in quite a short period of time anyway.
There are also some things where difference in quality doesn’t really matter that much. We have some Foscarini and Poulsen ceiling light shades in the house, but because I’m not sitting on or holding them, it’s hard for me to discern any difference between them and the Ikea ones we have, although if you were an aficionado I’m sure you could.
Interstate moves are expensive. But much less so with just what fits in my CR-V. Ikea has helped fill the gaps with what I couldn’t get used. Now that I’m not making $25k/year I’m willing to start accumulating nice furniture.
Ahhh…those names!!!
Am I the only one who gets a little irritated by having to buy stuff that I can’t pronounce? 
The furniture is okay, worth the price, but very, very plain.
Simple straight shelves on simple straight poles. Flat closet doors on a flat frame.
No rounded corners, no bevels, no decorative trim anywhere.
The best thing at Ikea is the restaurant.
Oh…and also the cookies with the chocolate drops in the center.
Did you know their names actually do have some meaning and follow a convention?
As for IKEA, we do have IKEA stuff in the house, but I’m not really a big fan of it. Pretty much all the IKEA stuff we have is storage (cabinets and a few bookcases, and we bought a number of them used on Craigslist.) I really haven’t found any furniture of theirs that I like, though. Don’t like their couches, chairs, beds and have better luck finding stuff on Craigslist (and the occasional thrift store) that I prefer for even cheaper, but that takes a little more work and patience, so it’s understandable why many wouldn’t want to go that route if they needed something immediately.
I do enjoy going there to pick up some meatballs and salty licorice, though.
The food in the cafeteria is not too bad but the pieces of furniture usually broke after a year or so.
I’m thankfully at a point in my life where I’m buying “real” furniture, but if I was faced with fully furnishing an apartment, I might well buy some pieces at Ikea. I do have quite a bit of their kitchen and dining ware in my house.
At $40 for 6 place settings, my everyday plate and bowls are from Ikea. I bought 18 place settings for $120, and they are perfectly functional off-white plates. At under $1 each, their cordial glasses meet all my demands for a cordial glass. They hold liquids, they look ok. And my 2 favorite pots are from Ikea.
With that said, I rarely go there, unless I have guests that want to visit. Why? Because I hate their checkout lines. There are usually 4-6 people in front of me in line, and you don’t go to Ikea to buy 1 item. I refuse to go there for just a couple of items, because of those lines.
Oh, I almost forgot the item I have bought the most of. Ikea’s shopping bags. They are perfect for hauling and storing bulky board games. At $1.00 each, we’ve given away 2 dozen in the last year, to our friends that also play board games. (Yes, we did spend 12+ hours playing board games on International Tabletop Day 2017)
I like IKEA. All of our IKEA stuff is inexpensive, fits together correctly the first time (which is more than I can say for Target) and has held up well to repeated use over the years (which is more than I can say for Ashley Furniture and The Room Store).
I love IKEA, I’ve liked pretty much everything I got from them and as a person who is naturally thrifty (some would say miserly) and prefers function over from, I still conider it my go to place for furniture. However have to admit that the OP has a point regarding the layout. It is so obviously manipulative that it takes some of the shine off what I would otherwise consider to be a very customer friendly organization.
I like looking at their gadgetry and miscellaneous stuff. I don’t go that often, but I enjoy it.