Do Not Shop At Ikea
Written by tel on October 21, 2009 – 6:47 pm -Avoid IKEA at Malaga (or anywhere else for that matter) if you have a shred of common sense in your brain. The place is a nightmare from start to finish and is designed to make you buy more.
My latest visit to the place will definitely be my last as long as there is breath in my body. It was the last straw. Never again! I said that the last time as if it weren’t bad enough, but there is something about the store that women find irresistible and men find irritating in the extreme. This time took the biscuit, though only because of the sheer obstructiveness of the staff there, My wife is 8 months pregnant and wanted to pop in to buy a few picture frames. I reluctantly agreed to accompany her against my better judgement only because of her condition and she had no one else to go with. Here’s what happened.
When you enter the store, you are faced with an escalator to the first floor where the canteen is. Its actually not such a bad canteen and the prices are reasonable. Then there is the store itself. Now most logically thinking people would go round the store, buy what they came to buy, then pop into the canteen afterwards for a bite to eat and a coffee. But at Ikea, they have refined the art of forcing their customers to buy the maximum amount of goods by making this simple logical progression almost impossible. You see, if you do it that way around, you can enter the canteen from the entrance to the store, but you cannot leave that way. Oh no.
From the canteen, you have no choice but to follow the arrows all the way around the store, past all the goods in order to get to the exit. If you go down the stairs from the canteen, you still cannot get back to the entrance without following the ground floor area through all the goods for sale. It takes a long time and is wearying as it is easy to miss the exit and end up walking around the store in circles.
This is of course the general idea, because Ikea wants you to pass every single item in the store so that you’ll be tempted to buy something else. Ikea even admits this is why the store is laid out the way it is. They want you go to the canteen first, eat and drink so you feel a little more drowsy when you have to walk though the store because when you’re full of food and maybe a beer or glass of wine, you are more likely to buy something on impulse. Which is exactly what they want.
So back to my day from hell in Ikea.
My wife and I bought the picture frames, paid for them and took them to the car. We then went back up to the canteen for a bite to eat, as shopping done, its nice to relax that way. Then we tried to leave. She wasn’t feeling so good – 8 month pregnant can do that to you. The only way out from the canteen without going all the way around the store again is through the creche, which is not normally allowed, but we were sure they would make an exception in this case. There were two members of staff there, a man and a woman. We asked if we could go through to the entrance which was a few yards away on the other side of the creche.
They refused point blank.
They would not allow us to go through. No amount of arguing would change their minds. We had no choice but to go through the store to the marked exit. Yes, we had to walk all the way around the store again.
Well screw Ikea! I hate you and I’ll never return.
That was the most totally heartless, inhuman response to a genuine need to leave the store without having to walk the endless Walk of Doom through all their cheap and nasty goods I have ever encountered.
No Spanish store would do that to a heavily pregnant woman.
My God, the Spanish would be horrified if they knew that’s how these insensitive swines had behaved towards their customers. While rules may be rules, and I’m sure someone somewhere would be happy to quote the rule book on this, there are times when rules must be bent to allow for unusual circumstances. Not rigidly adhered to no matter what. This is supposed to be a free country, not a fascist regime.
So via this blog, I’m telling you. Don’t shop at that ugly, nasty, psychologically confusing place. It might sell cheap stuff, but what price do you place on common decency and humanity?
Do Not Shop at Ikea!
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Picture by G J Allen
