IKEA

[AlabamaYankee]

Has anyone been to the new Atlanta IKEA? My wife is interested in going (we're in Auburn) and I keep saying it will be too crowded. I'm not sure how much longer I'll be able to keep putting her off. So...is it mobbed? Is it worth the trip?

Thanks

[dflprincess]

1. I went to the one they opened near the Mall of America

in Bloomington, MNa few weeks after it opened. It was on a Wednesday night and it was mobbed. I haven't been back since so I've heard that weeknights aren't so bad anymore - but on weekends it's still said to be a zoo.

[Warpy]

2. the best time to do any shopping

is on Tuesday morning. This holds true even for that miserable Thanksgiving-Xmas period. There are few shoppers on Tuesday mornings, it's just an odd time.

[dhinojosa]

3. Man, that is a COOL store...

Your wife sounds like a shopper.....Make sure you got plenty of green. :)

[WorseBeforeBetter]

4. Just make sure you go before back-to-school shopping...

starts, or you might really be hatin' life. :-)

[deadmessengers]

5. Mob scene

My wife and I went to the grand opening on Wednesday morning, and it was more crowded than we'd ever seen any store since moving to Georgia 10 years ago. The store was pretty well prepared for the crowds, though - it wasn't unmanageable, just very crowded.

Personally, my advice to you would be to wait a month or so - the novelty will have worn off by then.

[tenshi816]

6. Have you ever actually been to Ikea?

I've only been in the UK, where I live now, but the Ikea stores here are laid out in such a way that you can't just walk in and go straight to the department you want. Instead you end up having to go through the entire store and the check-outs are at the end. This is one of the reasons it's such a mob scene in there, because you've got vast hordes of people just trying to get through the place to pay.

A Swedish friend of mine told me that when Ikea originally started up in Sweden, it was done that way deliberately as a way of making sure the customers were pretty much forced to see everything Ikea had to sell, whether they wanted to or not. Also, putting in a restaurant and kids' play area meant that many people saw a trip to Ikea as more than just a shopping trip, but also a day out. It was a highly innovative idea in Sweden. The big one-stop place was a concept that was readily embraced.

The thing is, there aren't that many people in Sweden, particularly for the size of the country, so Ikea shoppers there don't face the same crowd congestion that stores in more highly populated countries do. UK Ikea stores are always packed with people. I know that my husband feels like he's being sucked into hell when we go there because of the impossibility of just buying what we want quickly and then getting out (last time we went it was for some curtain rods and a couple of desk chairs and it took 3 hours from going in to getting out, and that was with us already knowing exactly which items we wanted before we went in!).

I like Ikea products though. Good value for the money, at least over here, and I'm assuming Ikea is the same in every country. If they ever start doing catalog sales, I'll buy a lot more often from them.

Good luck with the experience, but plan on being there for a while.

[deadmessengers]

7. Grocery stores have been doing this for decades

Instead you end up having to go through the entire store and the check-outs are at the end

This is a marketing trick designed to maximize impulse buying. Grocery stores do the same thing: for years, store designers would put bread on the far end of the store, and milk on the opposite end - making consumers walk from one end of the store to the other to get the 2 most commonly-purchased items. While they're at it, of course, consumers will get to see all the high-margin "endcap" items on the ends of each aisle. Chances were pretty good that they'd trigger an impulse purchase.

When I visited the new Atlanta Ikea on Wednesday, it was laid out similarly - you do have to walk through the whole place to get to the checkouts. They do have a map with 'shortcuts' that will get you to the door faster, but they're not very prominently marked, and kind of easy to miss.

[tenshi816]

8. I guess that's the difference with the UK stores -

there aren't any "shortcuts" to get out, you've got to follow the Ikea version of the Yellow Brick Road to get to the cash registers at the end.

The grocery store analogy doesn't really work - I can walk into a grocery store and buy milk if that's all I want to get without being herded through every single aisle in the store before I'm allowed into the checkout line. In Ikea, you don't have a choice.

[Atlanta Progressive]

9. Crowded but doable...

I went Saturday afternoon, which I can imagine, had crowds to rival opening. Yes, it was crowded, but not too crowded to be enjoyable.