Swedish (Ikea)

Member Name: tonybone

Product:	Ikea
Date:	03/01/02 (165 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Price

Disadvantages: Busy

I have to confess a love/hate relationship with Ikea, the Swedish furnishings/home improvement chain on a mission to conquer the world using only MDF. Even if you have spent the last decade on the planet IRSTA (see catalogue for details) you cannot fail to have noticed the strange springing-up of a number of vast blue and yellow warehouse stores at out-of-town retail parks. If you own or rent your own place, it is barely conceivable that you will not, at some point, have undertaken the IKEA experience, and hopefully lived to tell the tale… A recent spate of improvementitis took me back there recently for the first time in some years, and all the repressed memories came flooding back for me…

There are things I LOVE about Ikea… and I have to admit my home contains quite a lot of it. Where else can you fit out a home office for under £200, equip a first kitchen using a single large box, or sort out your storage problems for every room? Where did we go, before IKEA, when we needed little wooden drawer units, a sofa bed for under £150, or endless cute little aluminium candleholders? You know, the stuff you pick up on the way to the checkout that you had no idea you needed (OK maybe it’s just me that impulse buys sofa beds, but you surely get the general idea). How did young people - or the divorcees in the ads – kit out their own places before, without bankruptcy…? How can one little hexagonal key be so EFFEKTIV?

But there are also so many things I hate about Ikea mainly boiling down to the fact that they don’t seem to give a flying FACTUM about their customers – find what you want, give us the money, then get lost, we’re just not interested. They can call it what they like – environmental awareness and cost controlling are important issues, but they come at the price of often appalling customer service.

Our recent experiences seemed to exemplify this perfectly.

We arrive
d on Sunday morning, just before the store opened, and joined the queues of people waiting to go in. We knew exactly what we wanted to go and look at, but were forced to trek around the whole of the upstairs showroom looking for it… like by being made to pass around it, we might accidentally decide to buy a kitchen we didn’t come in for. With a toddler in a buggy Ikea at the weekend is a nightmare anyway, but when you know the area you want is just at the end of the route you are forced to follow you feel like the sheep in the field must feel as the smart dog whips them in to line… you daren't try to cut through or nip round, the signage doesn’t support it, the crowd won’t let it happen, and all your internal direction sensors get mysteriously shorted as you step out of the lift (I suspect some sort of infra-red beam).

Eventually we found the shelving units we were looking for, and hence were able to locate their position in the warehouse downstairs. Endless hours of ducking, weaving, UTSAGA and GRUNDTAL, to find a few references on tags, but at least we had a chance to see the things in situ, measure them against the catalogue dimensions just to make sure (spot on, incidentally) and see how they looked for real.

Upstairs mission accomplished, we stopped in the restaurant before tackling the ‘marketplace’ below. I tend to be reasonably philosophical about the pointlessness of setting myself up for frustration and had already perceived that ‘going to Ikea’ was, during the weekend at least, semantically equivalent to ‘spending the day at Ikea’. My husband, less of a veteran, was more surprised to realise that the day was half over and we hadn’t actually managed to buy anything yet, but was happy to regroup his energies over a generous portion of Swedish meatballs and chips. The ‘restaurant’ was buffet style, in the manner of a motorway service station, but with
rather better food (similar prices), the Scandinavian-inspired open sandwiches made a good value snack (reasonably filling provided someone else is having chips at your table), and they sell Organix baby food. They had a basket of apples at the till, but when I asked where I could wash one they suggested the toilets! Er, no thanks.

Thus replenished, we were finally fit to tackle the downstairs bit, known as the Marketplace. This is kind of a cross between Aladdin’s cave and a medieval torture chamber, and you need a strategy to tackle getting across to the other end -–again via a fixed route, if you deviate and try to cut straight through to Plants you enter a dimension loop and are forced to wander past rag-rugs and picture frames for eternity.

First point in your strategy is joining the all-out fight for a trolley. A batch arrives at random, and you may need a decorative Christmas item to use as a weapon. Once you have secured your assault transport, you need to set off for the exit – at this point a strategy mutually different from your partners can cause complications (mine = attempt to browse, pick up some useful kitchen stuff, see what’s new in fabrics, stock up on bulbs for all lamps as you can’t get there anywhere else, etc, his = head down and burn hard for exit, ‘we DON’T NEED any more bloody candles!’).

Suddenly the shop stops and you find yourself in a big scary warehouse, where you have to use your scrap of paper (lost it? Ha! You have to go round again, see you in 3 hours!) Where you wrote down the shelf location for the thing you want. You wrestle the boxes onto yet another trolley (well we needed another one) and finally make it to the checkout.

At the checkout they scan your goods, then you can either pay a ludicrous amount for home delivery, or do a crazy car park dance involving trying to reverse into the pick-up bay where you left your partner, 2 trolleys and
a buggy (as opposed to one the other end of the store!) Well, we had way too much stuff, with 3 in the car, so we had to pay £35 to get it all delivered. Could they deliver Friday, as we wouldn’t be able to assemble it until next weekend? Certainly madam, only £5/night storage. Yeah right.

So we lived with the boxes in the hall for a week, and eventually Saturday rolled around – old clothes, range of tools and babysitter all arranged, we set in to tackle the boxes.

All went swimmingly until about lunchtime, and I was feeling pretty chuffed with my TV cabinet, video shelves and toybox. Although my fingers were sore from the endless Allen key tightening, I decided to tackle the Big unit.

All the bits out, I carefully counted each screw and strange twisty bolt out before starting (over 200 of them), only to realise that we were in fact short of not a single screw, but rather several large pieces of wood.

A call to their helpline (several minutes on hold ‘if you want to smash your phone with an axe at this point, press 7, now’) and I finally got through to a human being who told me that particular item came in two boxes…

So to cut a very long story only slightly shorter, I was back through the Dartford Tunnel clutching my receipts and found myself in the ironically-named Customer Service Department, otherwise known as the Land that Time Forgot… There were definitely people in their who had been waiting since the pre-Jurassic period, with wild eyes and matted long beards (OK I exaggerate a little but you get the picture) they had been clutching their ticket for eternity, waiting for their number to come up. It is not somewhere I would willingly go at any time, but Saturday afternoon is really taking the PROCENT.

When mine turn duly arrived, I was informed that it was my duty to read a tiny label on the shelf warning me that the item I was selecting came in two boxes, and certa
inly not theirs to warn me at checkout that I only had half a unit on my trolley. I pointed out that they had cheerfully charged me for the complete item, and they said they were only too willing to provide me with it now. The problem, I explained, was that we had paid a £35 delivery charge as the thing did not fit in the car – I didn’t even go into the costs of the petrol, toll bridge and childcare involved in returning to collect something we had already paid to be delivered. The sales assistant at least had the decency to look sheepish when she said there was nothing they could do and it was totally my problem. By now I had been at the store for an hour and a half, my daughter was due to be collected from the babysitters, it was getting dark and I knew I still had a half-assembled storage unit spread all over the floor at home.

I considered a tactical bursting into tears, but knowing I wouldn’t be able to stop, I had to go outside and leave my stuff with a total stranger whilst bringing the car round to the pick –up point (and apologies to the young woman apparently under the impression you could in some way reserve a space for your Mum who had gone to get the car, you caught me at a bad moment, I’m normally quite polite, however you were lucky that by then I didn’t simply run you over). I managed to track down one of the elusive red-check-shirted assistants and explain my situation, and that I had a chronic back problem. ‘So have I’, he moaned, but eventually helped me demolish my car from the inside out, and rip up the carefully flat-packed package, so that all the bits could be crammed in just about. I headed back up the A2 seething with rage at the sheer bloody HASSLE of it all, as I risked imminent decapitation from the side of the unit which was resting on the half-folded passenger seat, reflecting upon the fact that I had never enjoyed spending money so little.

I still love them as much as
I hate them. The Units look terrific (we finally got them finished about midnight), and far classier than their price would suggest. When I can finally straighten up again I expect I can tidy loads of gear away and they can serve their purpose. The sofa bed goes with the room and is as comfy as you’d expect for £200, but will be fine for occasional use. My candles are lovely…

Avoid the truly tacky by careful choice, and you can pick up some attractively designed, well made furniture and fittings at Ikea. But the whole shopping experience can be a complete nightmare, leaving you in need of post traumatic stress treatment (and a chiropractor). If you have never been you need to experience it for sure, try and leave your kids at home, and apparently late night is much quieter.

My dream – one day – Ikea online! Just imagine.

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