Call me boring but IKEA is one of the greatest shops I know. I'd really like to own shares in IKEA.
I don't know any other furniture store that comes close to having decent design and decent quality combined with decent prices and immediate delivery. Most other cheap end furniture stores have crappy design, lousy quality.
As of today, if you want to buy a sofa, IKEA is one of the very few furniture stores where you can actually pick up the sofa right away. It's also one of the very few furniture stores that doesn't promote a few items and then hikes up the prices of other items. Prices are consistently average or sort of low so that customers trust that they are not being screwed.
They are also great at having products for all price points. Even if you don't buy that sofa you are still likely to spend some money on napkins or towels or the meatballs.
And imaging being able to test a new product or pricing or design in one or two of your stores that you know to have average customers and then roll out the product all over the world.
Same here, but that will not be possible. IKEA turns out to be a Dutch 'stichting', as described in a very interesting article in The Economist on the financial side of IKEA: http://www.economist.com/node/6919139
"[...] an outfit that ingeniously exploits the quirks of different jurisdictions to create a charity, dedicated to a somewhat banal cause, that is not only the world's richest foundation, but is at the moment also one of its least generous."
"The parent for all IKEA companies is Ingka Holding, a private Dutch-registered company. Ingka Holding, in turn, belongs entirely to Stichting Ingka Foundation. This is a Dutch-registered, tax-exempt, non-profit-making legal entity, which was given the shares of Mr Kamprad in 1982."
I agree that the "charity" definition is somewhat out of place here, but there's nothing with being a not for profit with definite goals -- the stated goal of "Innovation in the field of architectural and interior design" to me sounds a lot more solid than most other companies that are in it for a quick buck.
Basically, society has decided that charities are nice and therefore deserve a competitive boost in form of tax exempts. Now It has to decide how nice are non-profits with a little more care.
Walmart's online furniture offerings are starting to outcompete Ikea's low end when it comes to price and quality. And you can choose between free delivery or in-store pickup. I just bought furniture essentials (dining set, dresser, bookcase) for my new apartment on Walmart's site for nearly half the price of getting it all at Ikea. As I assemble them they look nice and seem very solid, and the reviews say they last at least a few years just like Ikea.
Walmart still isn't good for a few items, but those niches are nicely filled by Amazon (got an amazing 13 inch mattress from Amazon). Outside of those niches Walmart is cheaper than Amazon and Ikea.
I rent, not own, so I'm just talking about low-end here.
> close to having decent design and decent quality
Decent design, maybe, but decent quality, certainly not. Have you ever cut through IKEA furniture for starters ? Most of the "wooden" stuff they sell is made of small wood chunks glued together which have no strength altogether and can be cut through like butter. This is such a joke.
I recently cut through an IKEA table I owned, which looked like it had a wooden top, and I was shocked to discover it was actually carton below a very thin layer of wood that made up the volume.
IKEA's materials are the cheapest stuff ever, and they try to hide that with the design, but seriously, it's just shite past the appearance.
They have a wide range of products and their structure is readily advertised, so no surprise. My table is solid wood, weights a ton and is damn robust. Both my table and bed disassemble in a snap and look great. IOW great, thorough design, but there's the accompanying price tag. Barring outliers[0], their cheap offering is cheap throughout, down to the materials. I've been extremely disappointed with their mattresses though, at any price tag, but I'm picky on that front.
Most of the Ikea furniture we owned lost form in a few years:
Think sliding sections that stuck, aluminium tubes that deformed after some use.
I'm not sure about price but the experience was subpar. Won't buy something expensive from them, like a sofa.
We still enjoy Ikea as a source of smaller kitchenware and the like. And food is nice as well.
And most of the furniture in my room were custom-built. It's not that expensive even, and allowed us to make a very smart and integrated use of the space we've got.
Build times aren't great tho.
In my experience, any general assessment of the quality of Ikea furniture isn't really useful, because it spans a wider gamut than almost any other furniture retailer.
I've spent $40 on a chest of drawers that, while performing better than a $40 chest of drawers from Target, wasn't really all that great. I've also spent $150 on a different chest of drawers that has moved with me and still looks and feels as good as the day it was assembled. There's a rough you-get-what-you-pay-for with Ikea, but even that isn't a hard and fast rule: I bought the lowest-end sofa (since discontinued) back in 2005, and it's probably lasted longer than the next step up would have simply because it's a no-compromise wood-armed design rather than a some-compromises full-upholstery design.
There's also the Ikea "Stockholm" class, which tends to be priced more like Crate & Barrel, but I can't speak to its quality from experience.
I have a black leather couch I bought from Ikea more than 10 years ago (~$1000). To this day, its in my living/family room. Its survived 3+ moves, I've slept on it for months at a time, I've had friends have a lot of sex on it while I was out of town, etc. It has been through a lot of abuse, but still looks like new.
Interesting. I live in Europe, my house is entirely filled with IKEA furniture.
So is my the house of my closest family members. Not a single problem so far and we have been using those things since the nineties.
We buy probably the most expensive things in IKEA though (which is cheap compared to other places). If we buy a lamp, we buy the best one with LED lights and so on. So probably it has something to do with that.
I've heard similar problems from other people. I've been buying Ikea furniture almost my entire life and I've never experienced this problem. Naturally I've had Ikea products wear and tear, but not generally faster than products from other companies in comparable price ranges.
It's fine for what it is and would only buy for cheap office furniture.
My last home had an IKEA kitchen that was a little over 10 years old with IKEA cabinets and flooring and what not. It was garbage. Cabinets surrounding the sink base had turned into deteriorated cardboard from contact with water. The flooring, wood laminate, felt like walking on plastic. The cabinets sat on plastic stilts. The whole thing was cheap and lousy.
I tore that all out before I moved in a stick of furniture.
I recently left a 7 year old Ikea cabinets. Was in perfect shape, far better than the previous places I'd lived (the hardware they put on that stuff is fantastic). The countertop wasn't Ikea and the flooring was an engineered hardwood, also not Ikea.
Still I'd put those cabinets in my home again in a heartbeat.
Perhaps the price/performance ratio is not too bad but overall, the quality is lacking. Some have said their IKEA furniture has lasted for decades, well this is nothing special, really. Where I live it is normal to have furniture made of wood that is a hundred years old and it will be around for many more generations, if they decide to keep it. It always amazes me how many people are brainwashed with planned obsolescence.
2. Even if the quality was fine, I don't like the design.
Whenever I go to IKEA I feel some form of a culture shock. Everything looks so cold... so Scandinavian. I live in the Mediterranean and the furniture we are used to looks way different than what IKEA sell.
> * Where I live it is normal to have furniture made of wood that is a hundred years old and it will be around for many more generations, if they decide to keep it.*
That's great if you're well-off or one of your ancestors was. If you're trying to furnish an apartment on a tight budget, you are not going to get 100-year-old handcrafted hardwood no matter where you shop. You're basically saying "cheap furniture sucks because it's not as good as expensive furniture," which is obviously true but not really a useful observation.
What I meant to say was that the furniture itself is a hundred years old. All furniture was expensive back then but it was amortised long time ago.
My point is that IMHO some products are not worth having at all.
One time I bought a cheap desk at IKEA, a plain board with stainless steel legs. It soon started bothering me that placing a big pile of books on it would make it bend and I was then afraid to climb on top of it to clean the window, I was not sure it could support my weight. A few months later I had some guests who placed some heavy climbing equipment on it and managed to damage it, now the desk has a 5cm hole in the middle.
In retrospect, to me such desk is wasted money even if priced at 5$.
I ended up going to a local store and buying a proper desk for 4 times the price. It looks really nice and is very strong and it can be repaired if it ever gets damaged. Now, I could have spent the same money for a better quality desk in IKEA but in this price range there are other stores that can match the quality and even offer better looks (this is subjective - I'm not a fan of IKEA style).
Also I still have 5 CFL bulbs from IKEA which I will never use. They were cheap but I did not expect they could be this bad.
I feel like Ikea's main innovation was to integrate programmed obsolescence in tasteful furniture. Before I knew Ikea, buying a new bookshelf every couple years was foreign to me. Now, I have to take into consideration that any furniture I get there might break or bend under normal use, that even a wok might lose its non-stick surface after only a few uses, and many more reasons for my older relatives to make fun of me and my shiny purchases.
I recently graduated from Ikea though, and most of the furniture in my apartment is also custom built. Best decision I took in the last couple of years (this, and learning Haskell)
Most of our stuff is from Ikea. There's a 2 tables, 1 desk and 4 chairs in our apartment not from Ikea.
Nothing broke so far (3 years in). Our main sofa is a little bent in the middle, but not obviously so. I only noticed because before out vacuum cleaner's head could just fit underneath the sofa, and now only fits under at the far sides.
The quality is not great. Most of their furniture is pressed wood, and is easily damaged. But in their price segment, I think they do pretty well.
I really didn’t know that Germany was and still is such an important market for IKEA. It’s the country with the most stores (eight more than the US, but Germany has less than a third of the inhabitants of the US and is much more densely populated).
It looks like some smaller European countries might have a higher store per person count (Netherlands, for example), but of all the larger countries Germany has the most stores.
I wonder why IKEA expanded into Germany early and hasn’t lost steam since.
Ingvar Kamprad (the founder) is of German descent (his grandparents were german) so it is quite natural for him to expand to that market after Scandinavia, also being the largest economy of Europe doesn't hurt.
Germans like it cheap. And Ikea generally seems to offer a better quality than other cheap furniture chains.
It's of course not only that germans prefer to pay less, but also that while germany is economically doing well a broad percentage of people had only little real wage increase in the last 10 to 15 years.
What surprised me more was that the Canary Islands was one of the first markets for IKEA (before 1985). I mean, the Canary Islands before Madrid or New York? WTF? I can only assume they were using as a test market, like Kansas City for Google Fiber, but still... wow!
Well there are a lot of swedish stuff in the Canry islands. It's probably the number one holiday spot for Swedes. Or at least it was back then. Just walking down the beach there you'll hear swedish everywhere. And there are plenty of swedes who owns a house there...
A lot of IKEAs early international expansion was franchisees, so it's probably more a question of someone there was interested in starting a franchise than that IKEA made a conscious decision that it was a market they were interested in.
No other big box brand ever gained signifacant market share in Germany besides IKEA. As competition is low, it's natural for IKEA to continue saturating the market. They are even building stores in city centers now, e.g. in Hamburg.
Also: Culturally speaking, Germans have (like the Dutch), always valued good product design. There's a nice cultural fit between IKEA (economical, good design) and the german market.
Interesting factoid I learned yesterday at an IKEA in Toronto from an employee. The cost of returns/exchanges in their North American markets is 6X the international average because North American customers expect to return/exchange regardless of the rules or restrictions IKEA puts in place.
As someone who's worked retail in america, this is entirely unsurprising. I didn't sell furniture for the most part, but it's probably consistent with my experiences.
This has little to do with defective products. People just expect to be able to return any product they don't like, or if they got the wrong one, or for whatever arbitrary reason. I would always be asked by customers if they could return it if they didn't like it, and they were always dismayed to learn that we generally only took returns if the product was defective. I lost more than a few sales that way.
My guess is that this comes from two things. First, most people are wholly uninterested on doing any product research. They want to just buy something that seems right, and then just take it back if they don't like it. Second, some stores will accept returns so readily (sometimes even of merchandise not actually sold by that chain!) that customers now expect it from everyone. Khol's is particularly notorious for this - we joke that their return policy is "yes."
In some places consumer protection laws are non-existent. Even in the US some places will try to talk you out of it (ever try to return something in Chinatown, NYC). I'm surprised it isn't higher for their European stores. The EU consumer protection laws are much stronger than the ones in the US, as Apple has found out.
Yeah, in some ways they are, but the rules for returning stuff are usually that the thing must be defect in some obvious way. That you're unsatisfied is usually not enough. Even in the case (like online shopping) when you can return stuff, it has to be unopened and unused.
The rules on how long your product has to work are better, though.
Given that sometimes the only way to tell that an Ikea item is defective is to open it and try to put it together ("Hey, these holes don't line up, and that board is warped..."), a requirement to be unopened an unused would be ludicrous.
I love the Ikea pieces we have. As someone else said, they're far better than other put-it-together-yourself pieces I've ever bought. However, quality has been flaky. I bought 4x of a shelving unit (Trofast), and two of them had a single piece where the holes were not aligned correctly. (The first one, I thought maybe it was just me, but it was clear after putting together two more that #1 and #4 were defective.) Fortunately, it was a different piece in each, so I was able to cobble together three pieces of furniture and return the fourth.
They were very gracious and allowed me to return it despite the defect being only something you could tell when you actually tried to put it together. Since I was there with my kids, I would have been extremely unhappy had they asked me to demonstrate its failure. ;)
> Given that sometimes the only way to tell that an Ikea item is defective is to open it and try to put it together ("Hey, these holes don't line up, and that board is warped..."), a requirement to be unopened an unused would be ludicrous.
Judging from the wording of tormeh's comment, and if the regulations and customs are similar where s/he is located to those here in Sweden, unopened and unused was meant to refer to cases where you actually CAN return stuff no questions asked, such as when shopping through mail order or online (sometimes stores give you this opportunity anyway, but it's not something that's required by law or ubiquitous). It's not a given that you can always buy something, try it out and then return it if it's not explicitly stated.
If you're returning something because it was obviously defective when you bought it, then naturally it doesn't matter if you've opened the box.
The EU has pretty strong consumer protection laws but we don't have this culture where you just buy something and return it if you don't like it, even in shops that advertise you can do that. The social expectation is that you only buy things you want, and only return them if there's an actual problem with them.
We all buy things we want. As an American living in Europe it never occurred to me that I couldn't take something back because I simply didn't like it. The build quality was pretty bad.
I buy on impulse and I keep almost everything I buy. If you erect barriers, even psychological ones, I'm much less likely to return. These barriers aren't on Amazon. If I decide after receiving that it's not what I wanted I return it and buy something else.
That shop eventually went bankrupt and shutdown. It couldn't compete and win against it's current rivals and new online retailers. Who have same day delivery and simple return policy.
I am very happy that the largest european "charitable foundation"[1] is featured on HN. Too bad it doesn't do any charitable work. Decent products and decent customer service are important, raising capital by avoiding taxes appears to be more important.
[1] http://boingboing.net/2009/08/26/ikea-is-owned-by-a-c.html
As a young 20-something moving out into a place of my own in this day and age, I considered their cheap furniture more of a charity than anything else. I guess a soup kitchen would have been the next thing available to someone in my "salary" range.
Nice visualization, but it's missing one of the newest locations (understandably, as it just opened on April 22nd): Bodrum, Turkey!
What's interesting about this location is that it is, essentially, show room only. There's a smaller warehouse, but they don't stock the full line of items. For most items you will have to place a delivery order. I don't know if this is the first of it's kind, but it is a really interesting adaptation that Ikea has made to the market.
Even though Bodrum has experienced significant growth as of late, it is still primarily a seasonal resort town with the population tripling or even quadrupling during the summer months. It definitely wouldn't make sense to spend the money on a full-size warehouse that would only be used at full capacity 4 months of the year, but at the same time this is a market that seems very ripe for Ikea (many people furnishing summer homes probably aren't interested in premium furnishings). So kudos to Ikea for continuing to adapt to the market.
Why nothing in the African and South American continent. Morocco is a perfectly viable, stable economy. I would envision the same for Tunisia, Egypt, Ghana, Mozambique and South Africa. Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil (import laws are nuts) and Uruguay as well.
I wonder what goes into deciding when a country is suitable to have an IKEA? Is it corruption, stability, economy?
North Africa is a stable and dynamic market, since these countries are yet investing in infrastructure, from an article dated in 2008 , it was going to open a store in Algiers -Algeria- , but nothing has yet happened.
source : http://www.ccmp.fr/collection-ccmp/cas-ikea-en-algerie-une-c...
IKEA would blow Tokstok and the like out of the water in both quality and price.
Besides crazy import laws, what I see as the major blocker there is that Brazilians are not very fond of self-service stores and of having to carry their purchased stuff home and assemble it themselves.
Of course IKEA could try what they do in places like China, where they partner with a local company for delivery/assemble. But then maybe the price for that service would be a factor.
Very surprising how long it took them to enter the U.S. market, especially given that they were in North America (Canada) long before.
It'd be interesting to know more about how that decision was made, and also if this has shaped the general perception of Ikea in Canada vs. The States.
I attended the grand opening of the first Ikea in the USA in Plymouth Meeting PA as a little kid. (The chart says Conshohocken, thats actually a new store they opened recently)
Because my mom is British she knew what it was already and was geeking out but nobody else seemed as excited. I was really young but I kind of remember the opening being a pretty lavish affair without many people in attendance.
It's interesting that the stores on the Canary Islands opened so early compared to all of the other ones. On the one hand, they are islands so it makes sense to open a store like Ikea where you can make purchases from a large variety furniture and household items. On the other hand, you have to send via a container ship all of the goods to stock the stores; how often would you need to re-stock? How fast could you restock? how often could you update the offerings?
Well, everything has to be shipped there, so Ikea probably has a cost and speed advantage b/c of the flat-pack designs. Shipping has to be a much smaller % of total costs compared to pre-assembled furniture.
Maybe they just happened to be surprisingly scientific about finding the last remaining populations of germans not in driving range from an existing IKEA ;)
Joking aside: all those individually owned holiday apartments, all of them way too far from home to be furnished with hand-me-downs and often owned by people who, unlike the natives, already had a lot of exposure to the brand. Looks like the perfect market for IKEA.
Somewhat timely, as I just got back from the Canaries. My other half was surprised to see an Ikea on the way back to the airport and assumed it was new (she last visited in the last 90's). Turns out it had been there several years before we got one in the UK.
Edit2: Problem is with duplicate/wrong lat-long data attributes. Same issue with Heerlen/Haarlem and Boston (Stoughton)/Southampton.
Edit3: London (Wembley), Hamburg (Schnelsen), Milan (Carugate), Beijing (Chao Yang), St. Peterburg (Parnas), Ulm, and Samara aren't working at all as well.
It's missing the only two locations I've ever been to: one closed (Halifax) and one just opened (Taichung). Given that no dots disappeared, I suspect there were other closures that aren't shown.
There's another one that's a little funny. Ikea opened in Aalborg Denmark in the 80s and closed again in the 90s. That store isn't shown, it's only the reopening in 2008 that's listed.
Ah, so that's what that building is. The blue on the outside made me think it was just temporary construction covering or something. It's a little bit closer than Nebraska Furniture mart so I will have to check it out when it is done.
Yep, End of year 2015. The sign for KC passed through STL last month and caused a commotion of people thinking it was the STL one. I've been driving up to Chicago to hit IKEA and Fry's and have really been waiting for this one to open.
To make it even more useful, store name/city can be bubbled on hover on dot. But since the stores can be very concentrated at the end, one or combination of the following can to be done:
- combine dots into larger dots, and/or with different colors, or 3D-ize them if they touch one another.
Great visualisation of the opening of IKEA stores - doesn't appear to show the closure of stores though which could be an interesting addition (perhaps by changing the dot to another colour like black and then extinguishing it?)
The first 3 IKEA stores which opened in Sydney - Gordon (not Homebush Bay as is shown on this map), Blacktown and Moore Park - have all since closed - apparently due to a lack of car parking spaces.
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/ikea-plans-sec...
It frustrates me that even as they expand, they seem to have a distribution model that is one-way-only. If your local store doesn't have an item, you can locate the stores that have it, but they won't send it to the store nearest you. You can order items online, but you can't pick them up at a local store to save on the outrageously high shipping fees. This is even more frustrating when the item is unavailable online, but is sitting in another store 200 miles away. Can't they toss it on a truck for redistribution?
The stores are franchises, so it makes sense that they won't ship it from store to store. I can even sort of see why they might not want to ship a single item to a store; given that they might want to batch these things up and skip the middle step of a distribution center.
I think they should probably at least try to figure out site-to-store or equivalent if they want to expand their online presence (maybe there isn't enough profit in it if they have to put up with distribution inefficiencies).
IKEA should come to Mexico, furniture is really expensive here or low quality, if you want to save money and want quality you have to drive kms away to a carpenter town.
I can't speak to the quality of IKEA's items because I find that they have the store design from Hell. It's a labyrinth that inevitably snags significant others to waste an entire afternoon in a furniture store. Good luck convincing them to use the shortcuts. I prefer store designs that encourage a shorter, more purposeful shopping experience to one that makes me worry how far away the restrooms and my car are.
Interestingly, when I last went to Ikea, I had the coveted opposite feeling. However, we were shopping for an entire houses worth of furniture, so my use case was a bit different.
Because of the large and sequential layout, we were able to go through, test, and choose all the furniture we where looking for in a single pass.
The shortcuts are there if you need them, I can be in and out in 10 minutes if I'm looking for something specific. I consider it a very good example of offering a "default" route without taking away your choice. If you want to go straight to bathroom and then leave and your SO wants to tour the store, that's something you need to resolve between the two of you, not Ikea's fault.
Something is wrong with this. A dot appears in Southeast Michigan in 1985 when "Philadelphia (Conshohocken)" scrolls past. We're not anywhere near there, and the first IKEA in this area (excluding stuff in Canada, a couple hours away) opened in 2006.
What's interesting is that if I go to 2006 and find "Detroit (Canton)" and scrub back and forth this dot disappears and reappears.
They had 6 stores in Canada before they opened their first store in the USA? I wonder what made Canada such an attractive market for them (or what made the USA unattractive). They got into the USA in 1985, when the USA currency hit its post 1973 (floating) exchange rate peak. I wonder if the high exchange rate was a plus or minus from IKEAs point of view?
Not sure if it's what happened here, but - companies will sometimes "test the waters" in Canada and iron out the kinks before coming to the US. If they screw up, it's on a much smaller stage, and it can be fixed more quietly.
I didn't like the way the list of stores on the RHS seemed to be out of synch with the map, until I realised I needed to be looking at the top of the list, where the items were turning yellow.
A better design IMO would have a highlighted letterbox in the middle of that list, with stores adding to the map as they hit that.
This is a really great and simple visualization, I definitely enjoyed seeing all the little dots go kerplunk :-)
One minor issue is that I think your Boston (Stoughton) store GPS coords might be wrong. Scrolling through I noticed the point was dropped in the UK somewhere, might be a confusion with Stoughton, Leicestershire.
It says the first IKEA store in Melbourne opened in 2003 at Richmond. This is incorrect.
There was one in Moorabbin which closed its' doors in 2005 and had been open for quite a number of years prior to that.
I have items that I purchased there that still work.
And I'm surprised they never opened a store in NZ.
Just to clarify, both York and North York are now a part of the amalgamated city of Toronto (1998), and do not exist as distinct jurisdictions. Colloquially people still refer to North York, but seldom refer to York as a distinct area. It's just Toronto.
On this same line of British names in North America, Fort York was the British military fort in Toronto
I remember going to this IKEA as a kid in the late '70s. It wasn't really fancy like the stores are now, but they did have a ball room which was essentially a cage in the middle of the warehouse filled with balls and no supervision. My sister and I loved it.
I'm still trying to figure out how there was an IKEA in my area in the early 90's yet I didn't really know about or what IKEA was until sometime within the last 5 years.
I don't know any other furniture store that comes close to having decent design and decent quality combined with decent prices and immediate delivery. Most other cheap end furniture stores have crappy design, lousy quality.
As of today, if you want to buy a sofa, IKEA is one of the very few furniture stores where you can actually pick up the sofa right away. It's also one of the very few furniture stores that doesn't promote a few items and then hikes up the prices of other items. Prices are consistently average or sort of low so that customers trust that they are not being screwed.
They are also great at having products for all price points. Even if you don't buy that sofa you are still likely to spend some money on napkins or towels or the meatballs.
And imaging being able to test a new product or pricing or design in one or two of your stores that you know to have average customers and then roll out the product all over the world.