Friday, December 19, 2008

Oh joy oh bliss

Just recently it was announced that our fair city is getting ..... wait for it ..... our very own .... oh joy oh bliss I can hardly wait ... free standing, massive IKEA store!

I think I am one of the very few that aren't simply orgasmic about this. Best of luck to them all. May their experience be much better than mine.

Top of the season to you all. Cheers.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

For what it's worth, our family has stopped shopping at Ikea. It's a shame because they have some nice looking things at reasonable prices. So why have we stopped? Well, we have 4 Ikea dressers in our bedroom and two very attractive Ikea sidetables in our kitchen. The drawer bottoms are bending and falling out in all four dressers and one of the two sidetables. These are not overloaded drawers... Just regular sock, underwear and shirt drawers. But try to complain or comment on their substandard quality... you can't! There just doesn't seem to be a mechanism. It's astounding how short sighted this company is. In their efforts to cut production costs and maximize profit they're producing some real junk. That is not how you get repeat business and certainly runs counter to many of the successful business models of today (Toyota, Tescos, etc) that are based on customer satisfaction and not cost cutting. I'm totally with the person who wrote Ikea sucks!) Bye the way, we have a 50 year old dresser with some kind of sawdust pressboard drawer bottoms and those drawers have never sagged at all. Don't tell me with all its engineering skill Ikea can't make a non-sagging drawer. MORONS!

Rachel said...

i have a love/hate relationship with ikea. i love many of their products--some are obvious crap but others are quite nice. we just remodeled our kitchen with ikea cabinets and have been very pleased. with that said, i am at a loss to think of another store on earth that has worse customer service. it has gotten to the point where we don't wonder if an employee will be rude, it is just a question of when. i'm not asking anyone to carry my things or personal shop for me. all i want is to not have employees avoid helping me and to not have them roll their eyes and sigh at me when required to do actual work. it is crazy that they can be this bad at working with customers but still so popular. i also hate that they falsely advertise that you can take something back if it doesn't work out. what they don't tell you is that if it has been removed from its original packaging you are out of luck. yeah, like we can even tell when the item is flatpacked in loads of cardboard. and another thing! all that frickin' cardboard. they charge you 5 cents for a plastic bag but do nothing to help customers recycle mountains of cardboard. i could go on all day. good blog.

Anonymous said...

I work for IKEA Japan. What a lousy company! A day does not go by where I don't have to put up with their racist crap. I'm waiting on a few interview results so I can get the hell out of there. It is a pyramid scheme where the few at the top make HUGE salaries on the backs of the many at the bottom and, of course, at the expense of the customer. Price markup on the junk people buy is sometimes as high as 80% for larger things and almost 100% on some smaller things. Incredible.

That aside, the furniture really does suck. The only thing of real use in the entire store is the door marked "Exit" (no assembly required). There is nothing of quality to be found anywhere. Even the English sucks.

Dumbasses built TWO IKEA stores near each other in Western Japan. Osaka is historically a merchant town where people know value and Kobe is a trading port where people see things from all over the world regularly. Both stores are doing poorly and even when there are NO other customers in the store, someone is ALWAYS waiting at the return counter.

tete said...

Ikea has the worst customer service of all time. Cashiers seem never be happy at all. Also, returning an item is such a nightmare. One time, I had to wait for 50 minutes just to exchange something that was missing parts. Quality of the products are also terrible. You really get what you paid for -crappy stuffs. People made a big deal about this store, but shopping at Walmart or Target are much better.

Dream Therapy said...

I had the worse experience at IKEA Emeryville, CA Yesterday.Couldn't sleep all night...still very appalled by their hostile customer service department.
we spent about 2 thousand dollars on a living room set of Ektorp Sofa collection 2 weeks ago only to go home and find out that we were missing all the screws to one of the chaise. So we return to IKEA yesterday to request for our missing parts. Waited 15 mins to have our number called and when i got to the register, i mistakenly gave the lady one of the other receipt from the big purchase that didn't reflect the chaise purchase. She said " Mam, if you give me the right receipt then we could move on with this." Not liking her tone of voice i dig through my wallet for the correct receipt and flicked it lightly toward her direction and landed it right next to her key board. My husband realized that i was upset and told me to retreat with our baby toward the bench. The Lady then disappeared 10 mins into the back room. When she came out i heard that she was asking for my husbands drivers licensee and home address. He came back and told me that we have to wait some more since they don't have the parts in the back and someone will bring the parts from the aisles. so...we waited for another 10 mins until baby got fussy and my husband had to take him to the car. I sat there for another 5 mins and then i went to ask her for the status. she told me that I need to have patience and that they are still checking on the parts that she has no control over another department. I picked some indifference from her tone of voice and returned to her in another 5 mins and asked her again for the status. Without even pausing to check she said" You know what, we are out of stock and you need to leave and just wait for it in the mail." "will why didn't you just tell us you don't have the parts in the first place, instead making us wait all this time? are you following proper procedure or protocol?" I said...And she replied " you don't need to be yelling mam, I feel threatened and i think i need to call the security to escort you out." at the same time all the other customer service girl said..."yes...call security...we feel threatened!" I was so angry about their demeanor i walked out of the return asked another worker outside to help me get a supervisor. ( which was useless and more waste of my time) I was so upset I asked my husband to come back in and handle the rest. Oh yea...when my husband asked how he could file a complain to the manager on duty and was told that they have me on video tape yelling. Many other customers came to me and told me that they could proof that i wasn't yelling.
Yelling, threatened...these are subjective remarks for them to use against customers. I would love for them to play the tape and let everyone be the judge of that. Bottom line, we never got the parts to our furniture and its questionable if we will even receive it in the mail and I lost sleep over this unpleasant ordeal.I knew that i will never shop at the Emeryville IKEA ever again... Oh by the way...The Customer service Rap's Name is Catherine. Does anyone know an effective way to file a complain? I just want to prove that I was really mistreated.

Anonymous said...

BWAHAHAHAHA! Sucks to be you. Guess Ikea wins again!

Anonymous said...

Get a life. I mean..making a blog about ikea sucking? ur kidding rite? pathetic.