I hate IKEA stores

Design Discussions general design discussion
21

at least they put the designer’s picture and name on the product, so you know who to hate… and it’s not like some of the more expensive stuff is much better.

the closest one for me is 2.5 hours away, but it’s worth a day trip to canada (everything 30% off!) once a year or so.

Want to hone your design skills?

buy something, put it together, and find out that one last critical and custom KonTAcKT screw is missing. Or worse, the hole it goes into isn’t tapped, or is cross threaded, so you wreck the screw. Seen it all.

You can take it apart, drive 2.5 hours back to get a new unit, and find out its on backorder, and no, they don’t have that particular screw handy for you. Been there.

Or stay home and redesign a new way to put it together. Metric, schmetric. Final solution.

I just feel bad for the people who buy the stuff, pay for shipping, and don’t have the ability to work around some of those issues.

Ikea probably buys this hardware by the gross, why not stock a small percentage in a central location, and send it out as required? It could be worth it to not process all those missing hardware returns alone.

Or, stock and sell them like the cabinet handles and wheels and milk paint crap, or give them away with a large order of meatballs…

22

just a thought,:

perhaps the labyrinth style of layout prevents thiefs.
Well other than the fact that furniture is hard to lift.
Having to walk along a single path (with some well disguised shortcuts) past all those kids in blue and yellow without being noticed should be harder than a wallmart style layout.

23

I know many of the super malls (Gurnee Mills in IL) are set up on a zig zag on purpose. The thought is if the shopper sees all the stores by looking down a huge corridor they will be overwhelmed.

Maybe Ikea feels if the customer sees too many products at once he/she will be overwhelmed and leave without purchasing a thing.