At IKEA, You’re More Than A Valued Customer. You’re Like One of the Team
By: Stephanie Gruner Buckley
Tags: Parenting, Circulareconomy, Shopping, Motherhood, Customer Service

Photo by rarye on Flickr

It’s a rare sunny day in London, and instead of taking my daughter to the park, I’m waiting for the IKEA delivery guy. If there’s one thing that’s not designed for moms with young kids, it’s the whole do-it-yourself discount shopping experience.

First, you schlep out to the middle of nowhere on the subway on a rainy day (the rain is for effect, but it’s usually raining) to wait for a shuttle bus that’s so shaky it seems made of IKEA particleboard and foil. You arrive at the giant warehouse and wander through a maze with directions designed to get you to see everything but the exit.

I need a wardrobe and a dresser, and with a baby, I don’t have much time. The first wardrobe I spot is damaged, and the door no longer closes properly. I point this out to a friendly IKEA worker. He says it happens to models sometimes after months on the showroom floor. He walks away, leaving me to ponder how long one might last in my home. The answer is obvious, but I keep shopping anyway.

There was a time when I loved IKEA.

We had one near our old home in Italy. I used to go with a friend in her car. We’d spend a couple of hours shopping for simple, attractive plates or pillows or candles before treating ourselves to sushi at the IKEA food court.

It’s different in London and with a baby. It’s so much work. I’ve come to hate IKEA. It’s not just the poor quality or the self-loathing I feel over buying disposable furniture just because it’s cheap. What I despise most is the whole DIY aspect of discount shopping in which you’re more worker than customer.

First, you’re a designer. The bigger wardrobes come in separates, meaning you have to match doors and frames, pick shelves, hanging bars, shoe racks, and drawers. The IKEA people offer a few tips, and there are samples, but largely you’re on your own.

So there I am with my daughter (briefly occupied by the lights and a cookie) and my lousy design sense, trying to decide whether “birch effect” or “oak effect” goes best with gray glass doors and if the end product will clash with a black, brown dresser I found that’s actually made of wood. My daughter drops her cookie, and so in desperation, I turn to a 20-something employee, who I judge has design sense solely because of his funky eyeware. He suggests mirrored doors and a white frame, and I’m back on my own.

Nearing milk time, I choose a blackish-brown frame to go with the doors and dresser. We quickly zip back through the maze to a massive loading area downstairs where you’re supposed to match codes on an itemized list to boxes in the warehouse and then load them onto your cart. A helpful sign asks you to stack boxes (mine are bigger than I am) in the same direction to simplify checkout, the one function you don’t do yourself.

Workers are standing around chatting. So I don’t feel guilty acting lost and helpless until a nice guy offers to find my items and loads them onto the cart for me. I can’t push both my daughter and the cart, and so he helps me to checkout. Most people I see, even those with children, don’t ask for help. This must delight IKEA executives. I’m sure one shrewd Swede has already calculated the savings if customers could be persuaded to glue together particleboard and box it up as well.

After checkout, I head to shipping, where I’m told I’ll have to pay another £70 for delivery. I should take the hanging racks with me, says the smiling IKEA employee, because they always get lost. I politely refuse. I’m paying £70 not to lug my purchases across London on an IKEA bus and two subways.

Back home the next day, I’m waiting for the delivery. At noon, a man calls to say his van broke down. He’s getting another driver to deliver the boxes. Two men finally show up, and I direct them to the third floor. They reply that they have a van outside that’s double-parked and no parking permit. I say I can’t do it myself. “You’re lucky the other guy’s van broke down,” says one of them, grabbing the end of a box. “He was by himself.”

So there we are, racing back and forth from the van, grabbing boxes and carrying them upstairs before a cop shows up with a ticket or a car tries to get by the van.

On my second trip up the stairs with the shelves, I’m wondering if it’s accurate to add to my resume that I’ve worked for IKEA.

Finally, the men are gone, and I’m staring at a pile of boxes, feeling irritated that two days of work and £500-plus later, I still don’t have a wardrobe and a dresser. I estimate it will take my husband and me a half-day to build the furniture. We could have paid IKEA workers to do it, but that would have meant another £160 and a trip to town hall for a parking permit.

My daughter just rolls with it. She’s laughing and pulling at her new plaything, a long box split open at the end. One of the guys must have dropped it. A piece of blue-black chipboard sticks out, the corner already damaged just like the model in the store.