Visit to Ikea

Sometimes I visit Ikea. If you don't know what Ikea is, it is a Swedish furniture store selling self-assembling style furniture. The store is often busy and it is hard to find parking. Their furniture is inexpensive, but they often resemble designer furniture so if you want designer furniture look on budget, this is the place to go. They also sell vases, candles, mirrors, frames, plush toys, plates, knives, plants, lights, bed linens and most of the things you need in your home.

Over the years, they did make some changes and some are for good, some aren't so good, and there are things that they should have changed and haven't. Here are the list of things that I am happy about, and I am unhappy about.

Good Things About IKEA

1. Price --- Most of IKEA products are inexpensive. I believe it comes from manufacturing and selling by the same company so there's no middle man (distributor) who takes lots of money.
2. Quality --- Most of IKEA products are reasonably good quality. They also exchange or accept returns if you bring back within the certain time period. However the exchange/return lineup is quite long as well. You need to expect to wait at least one hour to be able to talk to someone.
3. Restaurant --- Just like other things in Ikea, restaurant is inexpensive. It is convenient to have a restaurant in the large store like Ikea. I don't say that the food is very good, but it is fine.
4. Kids friendly --- Ikea has lots of kids friendly features. Like the railing on the staircase for kids, kids play area, and kids section of the furniture store is quite nice as well.

Bad Things About IKEA

1. Too Busy --- It is hard to find parking, hard to get through the restaurant lineups and hard to go through the cashier. Everything has very long lineups.
2. No bag policy --- They sell these horrible looking Ikea bags, but basically no bag policy. It may be environmentally friendly but I find it customer unfriendly.
3. Warehouse staff are too busy --- Often they are too busy to give hands to customers.
4. Hard to carry home --- Ikea has delivery service and online order with extra charge, but not everything is online. Lots of goods there are very big and heavy and it does require physical strength to carry them around and bring them home. If you are physically weak and can't carry anything heavy for any medical reasons, you can't shop at Ikea. Even with delivery service, they will basically dump things at your entrance, so you will have to move them to somewhere else in your home. This is a store for healthy and strong people.
5. Out of stock items --- Looks like they bring in goods to warehouse every morning but sometimes popular items sell out in the afternoons. Some customers can not always come in the first thing in the morning. If something is that popular, it would be nice to bring a bit more to the warehouse.
6. IKEA chairs are uncomfortable --- Not sure if this is just me, but every chair I bought from Ikea isn't really comfortable. It seems to me that these are designed simply by the looks rather than how it should support human body.
7. No more sausage --- Ikea used to have this very delicious sausage from USA, but they stop bring it in. They say that because it isn't Swedish food. I miss Ikea breakfast with the sausage.

Image by WikiMedia (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/IKEA_Store_Elmhult.jpg)