<p>Hard to purchase a mattress online so my daughter and I head for IKEA, so she can purchase her very first mattress and bed before she moves into her apartment. First-timers for both of us inside an IKEA store. The showrooms/displays are nice, but the store is hard to navigate overall. There is virtually no customer service yet “clusters” of employees can be found talking to one another at various registers. After you shop for your item(s), you jot down the item and bin numbers on a form. Next, you go find your items in the warehouse section of the store unless, of course, you are willing to pay an extra $40.00, in which case one of the employees not doing anything will probably help you gather it. You then schlep your merchandise through check-out and pay for it. If you want delivery you now must wait in another line for this service and then yet another line to pay for the shipping.</p>
<p>We spent 30 minutes selecting the mattress and bed and another 2 hours pulling, paying, and arranging delivery.</p>
<p>Isn’t that sort of the point of Ikea though? I’ve always had good customer service experiences with them, although granted I knew what I wanted and just needed them to get something from the back or down from a shelf for me. </p>
<p>Bottom line: Ikea is meant to be cheap, so you sort of get what you pay for in terms of service. If you want someone following you around, delivering it, etc. go to a mattress store</p>
<p>OP is absolutely correct about how shopping at IKEA works. BUT: if you can get past the “you need to have half a day to spend on your adventure and you are essentially on your own and better have strong arms and a giant car” thing, IKEA can be lots and lots of fun. And, can save you a ton of money. I am simultaneously recovering from surgery and buying a second home, and because I was dying to get out of the house, we did an IKEA excursion on Friday. It was going to be just to check out the couches (which we are then buying used from Craigslist). We got home literally four hours later. And I spent all of Saturday recovering because apparently it is really stupid to walk for hours on a hard floor without taking a break! Bottomline: IKEA sucks you in, sends you into a shopping trance as you get all kinds of ideas for redecorating all of your rooms, and despite your best intentions, spits you out at the end with your wallet a little (or a lot) lighter, but generally happy with the day. The more often you go, the more you will learn the layout and shortcuts and can better hone in on what you really went there for. Over the years, we have done great there and have been happy with everything we have bought for our house and our office. Three pieces of advice to IKEA novices: (1) wear comfy shoes, (2) if you don’t want to spend money, leave your debit and credit cards at home, and (3) if you are really, really trying to save money, you can find just about every IKEA furniture piece on Craigslist for half or less the retail price. Oh. And maybe a fourth piece of advice: don’t go to IKEA if you are recovering from surgery! It will kill you!</p>
<p>I can understand those thoughts if it was your first Ikea trip. And you had a large item requiring delivery on top of that!</p>
<p>If we are going to Ikea we just plan it as a day trip from the get go. We have a routine. Get there around 10am, cruise the upstairs, write item #'s down, pick up little stuff in our cart along the way. When we’re done with upstairs, stop and “fuel up” at the cafeteria - get a mental break and a happy tummy! Then we tackle downstairs - the office, kitchen, lighting, photo frames, etc area - and finally we methodically cruise the warehouse for any items on shelves we need there. Check out and grab some cinnamon rolls or the inexpensive but delicious ice cream/yogurt (forget which it is!) for the hour trip back home! Exhausting, but fun!</p>
<p>The Ikea by my house has great customer service. I love Ikea. It’s fun to explore lol. It’s only a few miles away so it’s never a huge trip. My bedroom at home is almost all Ikea furniture and it’s held up very well. When I move in to a new apartment, I will use ikea.</p>
<p>As for the rest of your post… that’s Ikea. Were you just not expecting that? That’s part of why they’re so cheap.</p>
<p>I have never had a problem with the way IKEA operates. Nothing is THAT hard to find, it is all cheap, and for the price it is better quality than what Wal-Mart or Target sell! I have NEVER had that much trouble with IKEA, although perhaps that is because my first trip through did not requiring shipping, allowing me to ease into it a little better than the OP! I have several pieces of IKEA furniture, and a fair number of smaller items, never with the angst the OP has.</p>
<p>Anyway, as Futurama once said, “Enjoy your affordable Swedish crap!” And the meatballs, the tasty, tasty, semi-addictive meatballs.</p>
<p>I am not a fan, but we recently had a good experience. We went to Ikea near Boston to get a bed for my son. Employees were directing incoming traffic and we quickly found a parking spot! (When we left the lot was full and people were stalking us for our spot). I also detest the way you are forced to walk through the entire store to get to the department that interests you. Most of the beds were marked, “sold out”, but the “sold out” was crossed out, which we learned meant that they had received some new stock. We jotted down aisle numbers and bin numbers of the products we wanted - bed frame, slats (sold separately), and mattress, and headed for the storage/stock/shelf area where yes, I had to locate the items and pull them off the shelves and put them on our cart. Most intimidating were the long long lines of people waiting to check out. Here is the good news: We pulled into the self service line. While there were 6 or 7 people in front of us there were 8 self service stations, so the line moved quickly and we checked ourselves out within 10 minutes. Not bad at all. Then I skillfully assembled the bed at my son’s apartment and that was it.</p>
<p>At several points in our odyssey my wife asked numerous questions of IKEA employees and we got lots of help/advice/sympathy. No complaints here, especially given the madness of back to school in Boston.</p>
<p>You’re lucky that all of the hardware was there when you were assembling! Not so when our son bought his desk (at an IKEA over an hour from his house). Another long roundtrip during rush hour traffic and then long lines waiting to speak to someone about getting the hardware. Luckily there was another desk in stock so they gave us the hardware.</p>
<p>I’m glad I didn’t give Ikea a try. We have several bed places near my office (Sleepys, Sticks, Jordans, Bernie and Phyls) and a bunch of others in the downtown area. These places typically have one salesperson in the showroom or store but service is not a problem if you go at quiet times. I asked the salesperson at Sleepys if he had been busy and he said that he had recently - parents buying stuff for their kids going to college in Boston.</p>
<p>I’m considering replacing one of the mattresses at home and would definitely shop at one of our local places over Ikea.</p>
<p>IKEA has an orchestrated traffic flow designed so you see everything in a certain order and sometimes 2x. Above poster is correct, that you can easily move directly to what you want if you know the short cuts. It is clearly designed as a destination shopping trip, not a quick in/out. That said, the one by Newark Airport is <1 miles from a great outlet mall, so I have popped in/out for glassware on occasion when I’m in the area.</p>
<p>I think the key is that you should compare IKEA to someplace like Wal-Mart, and not to a full-service furniture store. By that standard, it’s really good.</p>
<p>I saw the title of this thread, laughed, and had to see the discussion. I have a real love-hate relationship with Ikea because I love going through the store and looking at all the cute furnishings and ideas…but HATE trying to assemble anything from there. If the hardware isn’t missing, the pre-drilled holes aren’t drilled, or they don’t line up. I have managed to assemble a few things over the years but not without a lot of swearing and sweating. Now I shy away from any furniture item unless they offer assembly.</p>
<p>Sorry you felt you had a bad experience at IKEA. </p>
<p>In case anyone is interested, the company’s name actual acronym is a comprising of the initials of the founder’s name (Ingvar Kamprad), the farm where he grew up (Elmtaryd), and his hometown (Agunnaryd, in Sweden).</p>
<p>Did an IKEA run this summer to get a new bedframe for D2. We were in and out in half an hour! I’m still patting myself on the back. D2 sent me a link to the bed she wanted. I checked online for its status at the store. That told me it was in stock, and the bin locations for the parts. Went in directly to the warehouse, loaded up the cart, found an empty checkstand–voila! </p>
<p>I’m always impressed by how they manage to engineer the stuff to fit into flat packs. And by how all the assembly instructions are in pictograms. And how they are able to come up with a seemingly endless list of Scandanavian-sounding names for every item. Are people hired to do that, or is there some sort of computer program that generates those? Is it like the subtitles at the start of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” where the addition of all sorts of diacritical marks makes everything sound Scandanavian? ;)</p>
<p>When we went to the IKEA in San Diego while dropping our D off at school, we first went on a very quiet Friday morning. It was really fun. When we went back the next day to pick up stuff after seeing her dorm room, it was nuts (Saturday am). We knew exactly what we needed and ended up being salmon (going the very wrong direction against the flow). We ended up in line behind a woman who had probably forty boxes on a cart and thought we were screwed. But she had stacked the boxes so that all the bar codes were facing the correct way and was checked out in two minutes. Impressive! We whispered that she must have a “PhD in IKEA”. </p>
D2 sent me a link to the bed she wanted. I checked online for its status at the store. That told me it was in stock, and the bin locations for the parts. Went in directly to the warehouse, loaded up the cart, found an empty checkstand–voila! </p>