Call me boring but IKEA is one of the greatest shops I know. I'd really like to own shares in IKEA.
I don't know any other furniture store that comes close to having decent design and decent quality combined with decent prices and immediate delivery. Most other cheap end furniture stores have crappy design, lousy quality.
As of today, if you want to buy a sofa, IKEA is one of the very few furniture stores where you can actually pick up the sofa right away. It's also one of the very few furniture stores that doesn't promote a few items and then hikes up the prices of other items. Prices are consistently average or sort of low so that customers trust that they are not being screwed.
They are also great at having products for all price points. Even if you don't buy that sofa you are still likely to spend some money on napkins or towels or the meatballs.
And imaging being able to test a new product or pricing or design in one or two of your stores that you know to have average customers and then roll out the product all over the world.
Same here, but that will not be possible. IKEA turns out to be a Dutch 'stichting', as described in a very interesting article in The Economist on the financial side of IKEA: http://www.economist.com/node/6919139
"[...] an outfit that ingeniously exploits the quirks of different jurisdictions to create a charity, dedicated to a somewhat banal cause, that is not only the world's richest foundation, but is at the moment also one of its least generous."
"The parent for all IKEA companies is Ingka Holding, a private Dutch-registered company. Ingka Holding, in turn, belongs entirely to Stichting Ingka Foundation. This is a Dutch-registered, tax-exempt, non-profit-making legal entity, which was given the shares of Mr Kamprad in 1982."
Walmart's online furniture offerings are starting to outcompete Ikea's low end when it comes to price and quality. And you can choose between free delivery or in-store pickup. I just bought furniture essentials (dining set, dresser, bookcase) for my new apartment on Walmart's site for nearly half the price of getting it all at Ikea. As I assemble them they look nice and seem very solid, and the reviews say they last at least a few years just like Ikea.
Walmart still isn't good for a few items, but those niches are nicely filled by Amazon (got an amazing 13 inch mattress from Amazon). Outside of those niches Walmart is cheaper than Amazon and Ikea.
I rent, not own, so I'm just talking about low-end here.
> close to having decent design and decent quality
Decent design, maybe, but decent quality, certainly not. Have you ever cut through IKEA furniture for starters ? Most of the "wooden" stuff they sell is made of small wood chunks glued together which have no strength altogether and can be cut through like butter. This is such a joke.
I recently cut through an IKEA table I owned, which looked like it had a wooden top, and I was shocked to discover it was actually carton below a very thin layer of wood that made up the volume.
IKEA's materials are the cheapest stuff ever, and they try to hide that with the design, but seriously, it's just shite past the appearance.
Most of the Ikea furniture we owned lost form in a few years:
Think sliding sections that stuck, aluminium tubes that deformed after some use.
I'm not sure about price but the experience was subpar. Won't buy something expensive from them, like a sofa.
We still enjoy Ikea as a source of smaller kitchenware and the like. And food is nice as well.
And most of the furniture in my room were custom-built. It's not that expensive even, and allowed us to make a very smart and integrated use of the space we've got.
Build times aren't great tho.
I really didn’t know that Germany was and still is such an important market for IKEA. It’s the country with the most stores (eight more than the US, but Germany has less than a third of the inhabitants of the US and is much more densely populated).
It looks like some smaller European countries might have a higher store per person count (Netherlands, for example), but of all the larger countries Germany has the most stores.
I wonder why IKEA expanded into Germany early and hasn’t lost steam since.
Ingvar Kamprad (the founder) is of German descent (his grandparents were german) so it is quite natural for him to expand to that market after Scandinavia, also being the largest economy of Europe doesn't hurt.
Germans like it cheap. And Ikea generally seems to offer a better quality than other cheap furniture chains.
It's of course not only that germans prefer to pay less, but also that while germany is economically doing well a broad percentage of people had only little real wage increase in the last 10 to 15 years.
What surprised me more was that the Canary Islands was one of the first markets for IKEA (before 1985). I mean, the Canary Islands before Madrid or New York? WTF? I can only assume they were using as a test market, like Kansas City for Google Fiber, but still... wow!
No other big box brand ever gained signifacant market share in Germany besides IKEA. As competition is low, it's natural for IKEA to continue saturating the market. They are even building stores in city centers now, e.g. in Hamburg.
Also: Culturally speaking, Germans have (like the Dutch), always valued good product design. There's a nice cultural fit between IKEA (economical, good design) and the german market.
Interesting factoid I learned yesterday at an IKEA in Toronto from an employee. The cost of returns/exchanges in their North American markets is 6X the international average because North American customers expect to return/exchange regardless of the rules or restrictions IKEA puts in place.
As someone who's worked retail in america, this is entirely unsurprising. I didn't sell furniture for the most part, but it's probably consistent with my experiences.
This has little to do with defective products. People just expect to be able to return any product they don't like, or if they got the wrong one, or for whatever arbitrary reason. I would always be asked by customers if they could return it if they didn't like it, and they were always dismayed to learn that we generally only took returns if the product was defective. I lost more than a few sales that way.
My guess is that this comes from two things. First, most people are wholly uninterested on doing any product research. They want to just buy something that seems right, and then just take it back if they don't like it. Second, some stores will accept returns so readily (sometimes even of merchandise not actually sold by that chain!) that customers now expect it from everyone. Khol's is particularly notorious for this - we joke that their return policy is "yes."
In some places consumer protection laws are non-existent. Even in the US some places will try to talk you out of it (ever try to return something in Chinatown, NYC). I'm surprised it isn't higher for their European stores. The EU consumer protection laws are much stronger than the ones in the US, as Apple has found out.
I am very happy that the largest european "charitable foundation"[1] is featured on HN. Too bad it doesn't do any charitable work. Decent products and decent customer service are important, raising capital by avoiding taxes appears to be more important.
[1] http://boingboing.net/2009/08/26/ikea-is-owned-by-a-c.html
As a young 20-something moving out into a place of my own in this day and age, I considered their cheap furniture more of a charity than anything else. I guess a soup kitchen would have been the next thing available to someone in my "salary" range.
Nice visualization, but it's missing one of the newest locations (understandably, as it just opened on April 22nd): Bodrum, Turkey!
What's interesting about this location is that it is, essentially, show room only. There's a smaller warehouse, but they don't stock the full line of items. For most items you will have to place a delivery order. I don't know if this is the first of it's kind, but it is a really interesting adaptation that Ikea has made to the market.
Even though Bodrum has experienced significant growth as of late, it is still primarily a seasonal resort town with the population tripling or even quadrupling during the summer months. It definitely wouldn't make sense to spend the money on a full-size warehouse that would only be used at full capacity 4 months of the year, but at the same time this is a market that seems very ripe for Ikea (many people furnishing summer homes probably aren't interested in premium furnishings). So kudos to Ikea for continuing to adapt to the market.
Why nothing in the African and South American continent. Morocco is a perfectly viable, stable economy. I would envision the same for Tunisia, Egypt, Ghana, Mozambique and South Africa. Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil (import laws are nuts) and Uruguay as well.
I wonder what goes into deciding when a country is suitable to have an IKEA? Is it corruption, stability, economy?
North Africa is a stable and dynamic market, since these countries are yet investing in infrastructure, from an article dated in 2008 , it was going to open a store in Algiers -Algeria- , but nothing has yet happened.
source : http://www.ccmp.fr/collection-ccmp/cas-ikea-en-algerie-une-c...
Very surprising how long it took them to enter the U.S. market, especially given that they were in North America (Canada) long before.
It'd be interesting to know more about how that decision was made, and also if this has shaped the general perception of Ikea in Canada vs. The States.
I attended the grand opening of the first Ikea in the USA in Plymouth Meeting PA as a little kid. (The chart says Conshohocken, thats actually a new store they opened recently)
Because my mom is British she knew what it was already and was geeking out but nobody else seemed as excited. I was really young but I kind of remember the opening being a pretty lavish affair without many people in attendance.
It's interesting that the stores on the Canary Islands opened so early compared to all of the other ones. On the one hand, they are islands so it makes sense to open a store like Ikea where you can make purchases from a large variety furniture and household items. On the other hand, you have to send via a container ship all of the goods to stock the stores; how often would you need to re-stock? How fast could you restock? how often could you update the offerings?
Edit2: Problem is with duplicate/wrong lat-long data attributes. Same issue with Heerlen/Haarlem and Boston (Stoughton)/Southampton.
Edit3: London (Wembley), Hamburg (Schnelsen), Milan (Carugate), Beijing (Chao Yang), St. Peterburg (Parnas), Ulm, and Samara aren't working at all as well.
It's missing the only two locations I've ever been to: one closed (Halifax) and one just opened (Taichung). Given that no dots disappeared, I suspect there were other closures that aren't shown.
Ah, so that's what that building is. The blue on the outside made me think it was just temporary construction covering or something. It's a little bit closer than Nebraska Furniture mart so I will have to check it out when it is done.
To make it even more useful, store name/city can be bubbled on hover on dot. But since the stores can be very concentrated at the end, one or combination of the following can to be done:
- combine dots into larger dots, and/or with different colors, or 3D-ize them if they touch one another.
Great visualisation of the opening of IKEA stores - doesn't appear to show the closure of stores though which could be an interesting addition (perhaps by changing the dot to another colour like black and then extinguishing it?)
The first 3 IKEA stores which opened in Sydney - Gordon (not Homebush Bay as is shown on this map), Blacktown and Moore Park - have all since closed - apparently due to a lack of car parking spaces.
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/ikea-plans-sec...
It frustrates me that even as they expand, they seem to have a distribution model that is one-way-only. If your local store doesn't have an item, you can locate the stores that have it, but they won't send it to the store nearest you. You can order items online, but you can't pick them up at a local store to save on the outrageously high shipping fees. This is even more frustrating when the item is unavailable online, but is sitting in another store 200 miles away. Can't they toss it on a truck for redistribution?
[+] [-] flexie|12 years ago|reply
I don't know any other furniture store that comes close to having decent design and decent quality combined with decent prices and immediate delivery. Most other cheap end furniture stores have crappy design, lousy quality.
As of today, if you want to buy a sofa, IKEA is one of the very few furniture stores where you can actually pick up the sofa right away. It's also one of the very few furniture stores that doesn't promote a few items and then hikes up the prices of other items. Prices are consistently average or sort of low so that customers trust that they are not being screwed.
They are also great at having products for all price points. Even if you don't buy that sofa you are still likely to spend some money on napkins or towels or the meatballs.
And imaging being able to test a new product or pricing or design in one or two of your stores that you know to have average customers and then roll out the product all over the world.
[+] [-] jschulenklopper|12 years ago|reply
Same here, but that will not be possible. IKEA turns out to be a Dutch 'stichting', as described in a very interesting article in The Economist on the financial side of IKEA: http://www.economist.com/node/6919139
"[...] an outfit that ingeniously exploits the quirks of different jurisdictions to create a charity, dedicated to a somewhat banal cause, that is not only the world's richest foundation, but is at the moment also one of its least generous."
"The parent for all IKEA companies is Ingka Holding, a private Dutch-registered company. Ingka Holding, in turn, belongs entirely to Stichting Ingka Foundation. This is a Dutch-registered, tax-exempt, non-profit-making legal entity, which was given the shares of Mr Kamprad in 1982."
[+] [-] drak0n1c|12 years ago|reply
Walmart still isn't good for a few items, but those niches are nicely filled by Amazon (got an amazing 13 inch mattress from Amazon). Outside of those niches Walmart is cheaper than Amazon and Ikea.
I rent, not own, so I'm just talking about low-end here.
[+] [-] ekianjo|12 years ago|reply
Decent design, maybe, but decent quality, certainly not. Have you ever cut through IKEA furniture for starters ? Most of the "wooden" stuff they sell is made of small wood chunks glued together which have no strength altogether and can be cut through like butter. This is such a joke.
I recently cut through an IKEA table I owned, which looked like it had a wooden top, and I was shocked to discover it was actually carton below a very thin layer of wood that made up the volume.
IKEA's materials are the cheapest stuff ever, and they try to hide that with the design, but seriously, it's just shite past the appearance.
[+] [-] guard-of-terra|12 years ago|reply
Most of the Ikea furniture we owned lost form in a few years: Think sliding sections that stuck, aluminium tubes that deformed after some use.
I'm not sure about price but the experience was subpar. Won't buy something expensive from them, like a sofa.
We still enjoy Ikea as a source of smaller kitchenware and the like. And food is nice as well.
And most of the furniture in my room were custom-built. It's not that expensive even, and allowed us to make a very smart and integrated use of the space we've got. Build times aren't great tho.
[+] [-] arrrg|12 years ago|reply
It looks like some smaller European countries might have a higher store per person count (Netherlands, for example), but of all the larger countries Germany has the most stores.
I wonder why IKEA expanded into Germany early and hasn’t lost steam since.
[+] [-] hjnilsson|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omnibrain|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] naterator|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pfalke|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edemay|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waterside81|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neona|12 years ago|reply
This has little to do with defective products. People just expect to be able to return any product they don't like, or if they got the wrong one, or for whatever arbitrary reason. I would always be asked by customers if they could return it if they didn't like it, and they were always dismayed to learn that we generally only took returns if the product was defective. I lost more than a few sales that way.
My guess is that this comes from two things. First, most people are wholly uninterested on doing any product research. They want to just buy something that seems right, and then just take it back if they don't like it. Second, some stores will accept returns so readily (sometimes even of merchandise not actually sold by that chain!) that customers now expect it from everyone. Khol's is particularly notorious for this - we joke that their return policy is "yes."
[+] [-] yardie|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giarc|12 years ago|reply
1. People would bring in furniture that was no longer sold at IKEA but claimed they just bought it 30 days ago.
2. People would go around to garage/yard sales and buy used IKEA furniture and then try to return it.
[+] [-] antman|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Einstalbert|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jballanc|12 years ago|reply
What's interesting about this location is that it is, essentially, show room only. There's a smaller warehouse, but they don't stock the full line of items. For most items you will have to place a delivery order. I don't know if this is the first of it's kind, but it is a really interesting adaptation that Ikea has made to the market.
Even though Bodrum has experienced significant growth as of late, it is still primarily a seasonal resort town with the population tripling or even quadrupling during the summer months. It definitely wouldn't make sense to spend the money on a full-size warehouse that would only be used at full capacity 4 months of the year, but at the same time this is a market that seems very ripe for Ikea (many people furnishing summer homes probably aren't interested in premium furnishings). So kudos to Ikea for continuing to adapt to the market.
[+] [-] yardie|12 years ago|reply
I wonder what goes into deciding when a country is suitable to have an IKEA? Is it corruption, stability, economy?
[+] [-] andyroid|12 years ago|reply
[0] http://www.theage.com.au/world/corruption-halts-ikea-in-russ...
[+] [-] wallzz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hcarvalhoalves|12 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.tokstok.com.br/
[+] [-] crussmann|12 years ago|reply
It'd be interesting to know more about how that decision was made, and also if this has shaped the general perception of Ikea in Canada vs. The States.
[+] [-] calgoo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rwhitman|12 years ago|reply
Because my mom is British she knew what it was already and was geeking out but nobody else seemed as excited. I was really young but I kind of remember the opening being a pretty lavish affair without many people in attendance.
[+] [-] smackfu|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madeofpalk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snake_plissken|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TomatoTomato|12 years ago|reply
Edit: and when you go backwards past/before Detroit, it removes both Detroit and the Woodbridge points
[+] [-] TomatoTomato|12 years ago|reply
Edit3: London (Wembley), Hamburg (Schnelsen), Milan (Carugate), Beijing (Chao Yang), St. Peterburg (Parnas), Ulm, and Samara aren't working at all as well.
[+] [-] tonypace|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djb_hackernews|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] encoderer|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cyph0n|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omnibrain|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] croisillon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wf|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] hospadam|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fuzzythinker|12 years ago|reply
- combine dots into larger dots, and/or with different colors, or 3D-ize them if they touch one another.
- magnify europe into empty ocean space.
- scale map according to screen width.
[+] [-] ojbyrne|12 years ago|reply
http://askville.amazon.com/IKEA-stores-USA-compared-years-ag...
[+] [-] asciimo|12 years ago|reply
I don't think I've seen this flavor of apostrophe misuse before.
[+] [-] thedays|12 years ago|reply
The first 3 IKEA stores which opened in Sydney - Gordon (not Homebush Bay as is shown on this map), Blacktown and Moore Park - have all since closed - apparently due to a lack of car parking spaces. http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/ikea-plans-sec...
[+] [-] jackalope|12 years ago|reply