Ikea must be singled out for special hatred. I used to think I hated Ikea only for their lack of QC of their increasingly “Any Old Shit Made in China” product line, their stupidly non-customer-focused product line*, their non-standard product dimensions, or their utter refusal to offer ecommerce sales (trust me, do NOT try to order anything from Ikea online).
(*They basically sell what they want to sell, I BET you their sales figures show this, that their long tail is very long due to attempted projection of their tastes not understanding of their market)
But after another fateful visit yesterday I can now pinpoint the exact reason why I would like to see Ikea burned in hellfire:
–> They have a strong and uniform company culture and mission. It is as follows: “We Are Right, We Are God’s Gift To Civilization, You Plebeian Idiot Customers Go To F#$^#ing Hell”
This attitude is richly demonstrated in every single aspect of their company presentation. Most companies and shops (particularly in the UK) demonstrate some kind of ignorance or carelessness when it comes to being customer-oriented and understanding the concept that the customer is right. But the gigantic middle finger in your face results that Ikea delivers can only be part of an overarching warped business concept that they are right and we customers are all wrong.
The above mentioned main problems of poor quality, non-customer-focused product offerings, and lack of ecommerce are symptoms of this.
Let’s have a look at more examples.
Notices for customers in the store all adopt a condescending “you idiot customers need to be educated” tone… unbelievably there is an established theme of explaining the “system” in the angle “Why Should I —-” (e.g. “Why Should I Have Bring My Own Toilet Paper To Ikea?”) in the voice of the customer with “you foolish child, it is because we are superior” answers. To other companies, constantly hearing customers saying “why should I have to do xyz inconvenient confusing unexpected thing” would be a flag to say “let’s listen and improve that”. For Ikea it is a sign that we need to be educated in their superior way.
You get pencils to write down the items you want to buy, but they are tiny kindergarten pencils. And the piece of paper is tiny. With nothing to lean on. They do have some barcode scanner technology in evidence… however that is in the primarily self-service checkout areas. Yes, you generally have to do your own checkout because the staff are only there to watch you fail to swipe their non standard shaped barcodes with a withering gaze that says “you customers do not have enough IQ to deserve our attention” and more staff stand by the doors checking your receipts to see you are not stealing their works of art.
The pictures of the customer in help diagrams and product assembly manuals actually depict the customer in a deformed ugly cartoon shape as some kind of Jar Jar Binks Gungan-reptilian subspecies. Go figure.
The subliminally quiet, and then suddenly loud, piped muzak cycles randomly through “fsck you, this is our taste in music” bizarreness including some Philip Glass like tones that make you feel like you are being parodied as a suburban zombie in a Sam Mendes movie.
To get to the entrance (Ikea Southampton, UK) you have to arrive on the ground floor then go up 4 levels of outdoors escalators to reach the entrance at the top of the building. Even granted the idiotic donne that there must be one and one only fixed route through the store, this is shockingly bad, at the very least a heated atrium with lifts would be in order. (No road signs to get to the Ikea or its car park by the way.)
Just to state it again, the idea that there is one and one only possible route to walk through the store is an absolutely atrocious marketing and usability attitude. Signs for actually getting somewhere you want to go, via some Narnia like feint through a claustrophobic child’s bedroom setup into a carbon dioxide enriched living room, are patronizingly labelled, in ultra small font, “short cut to…” as if you are somehow cheating for not looking at all their heaven sent pine amateur carpentry. As you look around you, virtually all the customers are lost. Everyone is exhausted at the end and the checkout is like escaping from the labyrinth. At that point you still need to carry your stuff to your car and load it yourself, however big and heavy, because Ikea don’t only have no customer service… they actually hate their customers and wish we would all die so they could primp their store better without annoying plebs having to walk through it unappreciative of their design genius. (PS there are pictures of the designers with little biographies next to their DIY assembly furniture excretions, expounding how clever Sven or Gurt is for wearing square glasses. Actually perhaps the designers are mentally challenged or psychopathic prisoners doing a workshop? That could explain some things.)
Helper staff are few and far between; talking to each other not to customers; when overheard reluctantly talking to the great unwashed, it is in the mode “pah! well of course blabla, and as everyone knows lalalal, and only a fool would think Ikea should be otherwise, and haha you’ve got to be kidding why would we have those or help with that?”
On notices for customers, e.g. where a conveniently placed elevator says “staff only” it actually doesn’t say staff, it says “Co-Workers”. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! Even in voice announcements you are told to “ask a co-worker”. Either this is conscious irony that the ridiculous lack of usability in the store means we customers are also workers, or else it is a continuation of the insanely self-centred company culture.
The “cute/idiosyncratic” policy of naming products with (real? fake?) Swedish words is completely disorienting for the customer… you read what almost look like English words and then an umlaut shows you that it is a Haagen-Dazs style name of a product…. and the names as well as being unpronounceable give you no clue as to what the product is. All over the store, if the lost people have actually found the zone of things they need, you see them turning over piece by piece, peering inside the packaging to see “what t.f. actually is it?? is it what I am looking for or is a Bloedclot something else and actually I need to find a Fartt?” - the products in other words do not complement the stupid name by saying in plan English what it actually is. Yes, that’s right, nowhere on the label, package, or catlog does it say what the ffing item is. You just have to stare at the picture or pick it up and try to figure it out. It does have a part number and a barcode though. Only an idiot would not know how to read a barcode I suppose? As a result trying to match things up in a set, check sizes, or compare (find out?) prices is a total nightmare. All over the store you can see everyone with exactly that problem the whole time, plus as you get deeper inside the increasingly glazed expression of people with brain fog trying to read all these foreign words that sound like something but mean nothing.
As a side note, the arrogance of the catalog staff choosing the names of the products is shown in their lack of interest in whether the name sounds awful e.g. it would be utterly unsurprising to find a sofa called Krappa, a set of shelves called Shittstorm, a baby cradle called Thalidomide Flippa or a set of finger-slicingly serrated metal bed slats called Ørgäsm.
Even assuming we entered a parallel universe where Ikea stopped loathing their customers for a moment and corrected various nail-on-chalkboard customer care solecisms, overall the “massive store, overwhelm with undiscriminated options” and the “sporadic if any connection between catalog, store, and website” business models would cause me to hate them just for the lack of respect for human sanity. Ikea managers read “The Paradox Of Choice” and saw it as a primer for taunting us.
And a few more miscellaneous examples of the culture of arrogance at Ikea:
* The in store restaurant is resolutely self service, has only 4 main meal menu items, and the one item that is not some dumbed down “scandinavian” dish is an apparently deliberately poorly cooked British dish as if to show our national food as inferior.
* There is a hot dog bar right by the exit but no place to sit down and eat, so people get in the way of the exit. And this hot dog is for some reason not available in the main restaurant, only in the little desk at the exit. (Oh, and the mustard dispensers are hidden out of view so you have to ask where they are, and they both don’t work.)
* Posters decorating the walls feature pictures of Swedish cultural places and things with board of tourism like descriptions educating us about the world’s most advanced civilization.
* Small, dirty toilets
* Ragged, dirty product samples; general dirtiness of shop areas
* Disorganized shelves that you have to search through, with stuff strewn all over the floor
* Trolleys and pallets of not-yet-unpacked stock all over the place getting in the way
* Products grouped tightly together by category instead of sensibly/conveniently cross linked and cross promoted. E.g. go here for beds, walk 4 miles over there for pillows, and you idiot, you mean you didn’t see that the sheets and pillow covers are upstairs in textiles? Duh!
* Occasional signs that say “Lost?” and then a map which doesn’t say You Are Here on it, but instead delivers the message “Well HAHAHA FFFF YOU!”
* There are two types of trolley: a weird tiny one for just holding a bag (staff might show you how to hang the bag correctly on it but will only do so if it can make them feel smart and you stupid), and a gigantic heavy one for holding a whole sofa. There are no normal trollies in medium size for the other 96% of the customer profile.
* Large areas of the store square footage are not used, or are used for stacking stock in your way, not things for sale, a clear sign of an up-yours-who-needs-sales attitude.
* Never, ever, try to use Ikea phone helplines, assuming you can actually find any contact details (btw you cannot phone your local store, only the central switchboard)
Ikea, answer me this question in the style of your customer help notices:
“Why Should My Feet Bleed And Back Break To Give You My Cash For Your Chinese Shit?”
The answer from most of your customers is this:
“Because there is literally no alternative. We would love to shop elsewhere but furniture is an essential and there are virtually no other companies we can choose from.”
Therefore I am hopeful that, in time, with the natural selection of capitalism, Ikea will be vacated, bankrupted, shut down, and expelled to the halls of shame in marketing textbooks called “No, Arrogance Is Not A Business Model.”
See also other people who hate Ikea:
- http://www.becoming-home.com/2008/06/09/ikea-is-dead-to-me/
- http://noidontspeakgerman.blogspot.com/2008/07/ikea-i-hate-you.html
- http://www.consumeraffairs.com/furniture/ikea.html
- http://fortyquestions.blogspot.com/2009/06/ikea-food-is-people.html
Posted by George, Loves Everything Else In Life 
