Eshin Direct

My hate for Ikea¹ remains strong and now transcends borders. In a process-driven place like Singapore, the great blue and yellow brand finds a compliant home to fulfill its evil purpose.

The unfortunate truth is that Ikea will continue to dominate the market through the lack of any viable alternative. I write this post in the hope that a future Ikea-killer will come along and gain some useful insight on how not to run a furniture business.

We decided to go for the imaginatively named IVAR shelving unit system from Ikea. We were told that we wouldn’t be able to order it at the order counter, even if we wanted it for home delivery. For this, we would need to go down to the Lumberyard section for help which, unsurprisingly wasn’t any help except to tell us we needed to collect the components ourselves and take them to the cashiers to pay, and then on to home delivery.

The process for one of their cabinet/shelving units is to pick up the bits of lumber yourself on a trolley, walk, fifty meters and pay, and walk another 30 meters and arrange for home delivery. The product is obviously not going to fit into most car sizes in Asia so why bother even asking people to go this inconvenient process. How hard is it to programme in this product for delivery? They provide it for other furniture, so why not this particularly bulky item? Surely it is not a cost thing?

So, you’ve got as far as the check-out and you realize your forgot something. This is for items that need to be picked up from a separate “Pick-Up” counter and aren’t in the general walk-away items. It should be a simple thing to add something you want to buy² to add an additional item. Nope, those computers are just designed to grab your money before you have second thoughts about the purchases.

What do you do now? Well, after bringing all your purchases to the checkout, you have to traipse back in, and order from the correct terminal. You think the right thing to do is to maybe take your business elsewhere but then a small voice in your head (with a strange practical and Swedish accent) smugly mocks you with the valid question – “Where else are you going to go?”

If you were unlucky enough to order items that need to be collected, then you are in for a real treat especially if it is for home delivery. Once having paid, you now get to wait 20-30 minutes for your goods to arrive, which you then need to wheel over to the home delivery counter to arrange shipment. A walk of 20 meters isn’t really going to kill you but it will irritate most rationale people, especially since they then have to queue up again. Why Ikea, oh why? Why can’t you just order it from your order points and include it in a home delivery arrangement. Ikea has now wasted at least 30 minutes of my time.

This should have been the end to my little adventure with Ikea but then while I was waiting for the home delivery folks to sort out shipping³, I noticed that delivery for consignment under S$300 in value had a delivery charge of S$50 while consignments of more than S$300 are charged at $55. Huh? How does that work then? I will penalize you an extra five dollars because you are a higher value customer than a less than $300 customers. I doubt very much that $5 equates into so much more work for the delivery guys. In fact, it might have even been less work given that expensive items can be less bulky.

Deciding I had a really rather crappy customer experience, I did decide to approach one of the wage slaves at the customer service counter and ask for who I could write into to complain about Ikea to. Yes, perhaps I should have just accepted it but how else can they improve. To further add insult to injury, the staff’s attitude made out as if I was bothering her with a problem. Reluctantly, she gave me the name of the person to whom I should address my complaint.

In the end, not my most memorable experience at Ikea and one I will be sure to let Mr. Terrence Nielsen, Store Manager, know in my letter to him.

1. I Hate Ikea and Ikea Induced Sleep Deprivation [↩]
2. It really amuses me the lengths some companies go to have the perfect process at the expense of actually making money. [↩]
3. The shipping arrangement in itself took forever as they ended screwing up even that [↩]

Tags: company process, customer service, ikea, muppet files