Steve's Thoughts: Our Ikea Adventure

So a couple of days ago, we went to Ikea because we’re remodeling our kitchen and wanted to get out cabinets from there. Now going to Ikea isn’t like running into Wal Mart or Target, going to Ikea is an adventure. First of all, I have to compliment Ikea for designing a store focused on keeping families there all day buying furniture. They have childcare, a cafeteria, diapers and baby wipes in the bathrooms. If you can think of any excuse for leaving a furniture store, they’ve already thought of it and have a solution. So that was impressive.

So we got to Ikea at 1:00pm we started to walk around and I realized I forgot some paint samples in the car so I had to go back to the car to get them. Here’s another great design strategy of Ikea. The store is designed so that there is one entrance and one exit. In order to get to exit you have to go through the whole store. So it took me ten minutes to run to the car. In the meantime, I bought a bedroom set, a tv stand and a bookcase. Not really, but I wanted to to.

We finally get to the kitchen area where they have computer programs to design your kitchen. So about an hour later we had our kitchen designed and ready to order. We call one of lovely employees in the yellow and blue shirts to help us and wouldn’t you know that we asked the person training the new employee. This meant that everything took twice as long and Abby was having a meltdown. Awesome. We get our kitchen ordered and then it was off to the rest of the store to buy some more furniture.

Once we get through the maze of a store, we get to the checkout stands. Now we went on New Years Day, a day of the year that most people have off of work, so you would think the Ikea would have planned for this with extra checkout people. You would be wrong. Being that Ikea is the Costco of furniture, they had about four lines open and lines a mile long.

So finally, 4 hours after we entered Ikea, we left with a new kitchen, some lamps and completely exhausted.