Me No Likea

So what if one in ten Europeans were conceived on Ikea beds? So what if business is so good that main branches stay open until midnight every weekday? So what if the new Southampton store had cordoned queues during its opening fortnight just to get through the front door?

The place just makes me rumble.

Ikea is so smug. It treats customers to the quarter-mile slog as you have to walk through every damned department in order to reach the checkout (worse than the Hampton Court maze), and the stuff they sell seems to be of increasingly poor quality. When you buy a lamp - wouldn't it be nice if they included the (difficult to source elsewhere) bulb? Why was my hot dog cold?

I shouldn't rumble like this really as I am a believer in good, practical design; and Ikea often delivers that. But I do feel that the place should be subjected to some serious competition.

There is perceived value in Ikea - the paper napkins at a pound per large pack, and the very cheap glassware. But much of the furniture on display seems extraordinarily expensive - bearing in mind the very cheap materials used. The oven trays we bought were cheap, but cheaply made too (in Britain oddly), and much poorer quality than similar trays we purchased five years previously.

A great idea. Get the customers to actually build the items of furniture themselves, and still charge premium prices. By cooing on about how environmentally friendly and energy efficient everything is you are lulled into feeling how marvellous all this Scandinvian lifestyle furniture is. But it just makes me cross that our attempts to emulate the Ikea-phenomenon (the late MFI and Woolworth for kitchen stuff, and furniture stores like DFS and Harveys that sell credit rather than furniture) are so pitiful.