Ikea. Anybody had problems with them?

[melmerby]

The stuff I have already had is fine. (over £1000 worth)

It all went together easily, the instructions are very comprehensive and the quality is at least as good as the basic B&Q stuff which costs more.

It's just the IT that seems to be lacking.

 

Keith

[APOLLO]

What is the similarity between Cecil Parkinson and an IKEA wardrobe?

Answer: One loose screw and the whole Cabinet falls to pieces. 

 

Brit15

[F-UnitMad]

Only when they had no meatballs and my then Swedish girlfriend kicked off in store!

 

 

I kid you not.

 

 

 

Jason

I never have the peas, as 1) it's 50p more per scoop and 2) they're always cold by the time you've got through checkout & sat down to eat.

 

That about sums up the only trouble I've had with Ikea.

[Edwin_m]

I had a meltdown experience with Ikea online a few years ago.  The local store didn't carry the full range of wardrobes so it was a choice of ordering online (with a ridiculous fee of £35 or so) or driving to Milton Keynes and paying even more for long distance delivery as they wouldn't have fitted in the car. Some of the items were missing and I ended up after numerous phone calls with all the parts, a £15 voucher plus a refund for some items I actually received.  I did tell point this out but I think by then they just wanted to close the case and move on.  We are now about to need another set of wardrobes so I'm disappointed to read here that it hasn't improved much. 

 

The late founder Ingvar Kamprad was well known for frugality.  Perhaps he set up the website on an obsolete ZX Spectrum? 

Edited September 3, 2018 by Edwin_m

[Nearholmer]

I’m tempted to think that some of the weirdness of ikea’s approach is quite deliberate in that their model is based on stripping out ‘unnecessary’ cost, in order to offer very good value on what you do get.

 

The whole ‘warehouse’ approach to selling, and having the customer do all the lifting, shifting and transport is part of this ...... shopping at IKEA involves trading your time in exchange for a lower than otherwise price, and it was a radical idea when first introduced.

 

So, why take on, and pass on to the customer, the ‘unnecessary’ cost of having high-quality customer service and response to deal with the very small % of orders that go wrong in the detail?

 

It might be worth having good systems if not having them trashes your reputation, but if it doesn’t, why bother? People who want to be mollycoddled, and can afford to pay to be mollycoddled aren’t ikea’s target, they are John lewis’s target.

[jjb1970]

The problem I find with Ikea is that the good stuff isn't cheap (despite their claims) and the cheap stuff is no good. I bought a lot of stuff when we moved into this house as it allowed me to outfit the house at relatively low cost but I wasn't impressed with the quality and slowly replaced it all. I guess you get what you pay for and the stuff was cheap, but if you want their better stuff it's not cheap at all.

[melmerby]

 The local store didn't carry the full range of wardrobes so it was a choice of ordering online (with a ridiculous fee of £35 or so)

The delivery charges are weird.

 

Up to 25kg = £3.95, over £50 free.

More than 25kg = £35, but if spending over £300(?) only £17.50

 

Keith

[melmerby]

The problem I find with Ikea is that the good stuff isn't cheap (despite their claims) and the cheap stuff is no good.

I've bought a load of their cheapest Kitchen Cabinets and they are better quality than the opposition (B&Q, Homebase) at the budget end of the market and cheaper.

Their drawers are also superior

 

Mine are just replacements for the cabinets under my layout damaged by the flood and are ideal.

 

A problem that you may come across is the measurements.

UK Kitchen cabinets are generally about 720mm high + 150mm legs and 570 deep, which allows for a 600mm worktop with a small overhang at the front.

The 150 legs allow for a plinth with a built in heater if so desired!

Ikea cabinets are 800mm high with much shorter legs and are 600mm deep with little room for services behind them.

 

Keith

Edited September 3, 2018 by melmerby

[hayfield]

I’m tempted to think that some of the weirdness of ikea’s approach is quite deliberate in that their model is based on stripping out ‘unnecessary’ cost, in order to offer very good value on what you do get.

 

The whole ‘warehouse’ approach to selling, and having the customer do all the lifting, shifting and transport is part of this ...... shopping at IKEA involves trading your time in exchange for a lower than otherwise price, and it was a radical idea when first introduced.

 

So, why take on, and pass on to the customer, the ‘unnecessary’ cost of having high-quality customer service and response to deal with the very small % of orders that go wrong in the detail?

 

It might be worth having good systems if not having them trashes your reputation, but if it doesn’t, why bother? People who want to be mollycoddled, and can afford to pay to be mollycoddled aren’t ikea’s target, they are John lewis’s target.

 

 

In most businesses, retail especially staff costs are soaring and perhaps now the biggest overhead, looking at most out of town stores its the model started by MFI all those years ago.

Take your items to the check out / order from the sales desk, and take them home. Argos further refined the system by having catalogues rather than large show rooms. Amazon further refined the system by getting rid of the retail outlets. 

 

However Amazon are now opening stores, John Lewis are opening smaller stores offering next day collection for items not kept in store. Customers now seem to want a third option, online prices available to be picked up locally, saving white van man delivery issues

[Nick C]

The previous owners of our house fitted out the entire kitchen from Ikea. We wanted to add a dishwasher, so, thinking it would match, we went to Ikea. They were quite happy to sell us one (at a ludicrous price), but flatly refused to fit it - not just "It will cost more", but "No, we won't do it unless you buy at least 6 cabinets". We walked out, bought one for half the price from John Lewis, and I fitted it myself.

 

Of course the Ikea cabinets aren't a standard size, so there's now a gap.

 

The entire lot has been fitted as drawers, which makes quite a lot of it awkward to use (especially drawers-within-drawers, which are a really bizarre idea), except for the corner cabinet which has a rotating/sliding shelf - which falls off it's bracket about once a month and needs constant adjustment.

 

Overall I'm very unimpressed with their attitude, customer service and quality, so I won't be buying anything from there myself.

[RedgateModels]

A problem that you may come across is the measurements.

UK Kitchen cabinets are generally about 720mm high + 150mm legs and 570 deep, which allows for a 600mm worktop with a small overhang at the front.

The 150 legs allow for a plinth with a built in heater if so desired!

Ikea cabinets are 800mm high with much shorter legs and are 600mm deep with little room for services behind them.

 

Ah, but Ikea worktops are deeper than the norm, not by much but enough to compensate for the deeper bases. Personally I liked the smaller services gap at the back too, more storage with less wasted space

 

Ikea tend to use 18mm carcasses throughout too so are more robust than say B&Q's budget ranges.

[hayfield]

Kitchens, what a mine field and best left to the boss of the household. After a disastrous experience (with the salesman) in Wren. We went to Wicks where the sales person was very offish. Still went on another day and the salesman was so helpful, even down to how to obtain the maximum discount and plan adjustment (new build extension working from plans initially) once final sizes were known.

 

Best of all the wife is very happy with what she now has.

[ejstubbs]

For the record I've had lots of things from Ikea over the years. Never had a single problem. Good value, fits together well and

just does what it's supposed to do.

 

We've had a lot of stuff from Ikea over the years.

 

One problem that they've created for themselves in recent years has been making changes to long-lived and popular ranges.  The well-known example being the Expedit storage system, which they replaced with the lighter-build Kallax.  Although they retained the internal sizing - so that vinyl lovers could still use them for them LPs - the external sizing was slightly different, so if you wanted more storage, you ended up with mismatched cabinets.

 

More annoying for us was was their recent-ish changes to the Billy shelves.  The shelf support pegs in the new ones are smaller in diameter than in the old ones, which compromises flexibility when adding new Billy carcasses to existing shelving, or new shelves to existing carcasses.  Where we got tripped up, though, was in buying some Oxberg doors to fit to an existing Billy.  The screws supplied with the hinges for the new doors were sized to fit the new, smaller diameter holes but the Billy in question had the old, larger holes.  Ordinary wood screws don't work well (if at all) in the pre-drilled holes in the Ikea particle board carcasses.  After a few half-hearted attempts at bodging it with slivers of wood to pack out the holes, I hied myself off to our local store (which is, fortunately, not a long trip) with, as an example of what I needed, a screw from a hinge for a door which I had fitted to an old Billy many years ago.  The fellow I dealt with on the customer service desk was exemplary in his determination to find me what I wanted, disappearing off into the darkest recesses of the store to root through their spares bins before eventually reappearing with sixteen screws which were a good functional match for (though not identical to) the example I had provided*.  So, ten out of ten for customer service in resolving the problem, but minus a fair few marks for changing the design and not anticipating that people would find themselves in the position we did (and which a fair few others have too, judging by comments on various Ikea forums online).

 

Our other significant encounter with Ikea customer service occurred when we bought a kitchen from them.  Everything was delivered as ordered, no problems there, but unfortunately the joiner we employed to install it managed to mishandle the 4m long worktop with the embedded double sink and drainer such that the laminate around the sink lifted and cracked.  He admitted his error, and that over time it would cause problems with water soaking in to the substrate, and he arranged for it to be replaced at his own expense.  Which was fine.  Except that, after he'd installed the replacement, my wife noticed that the laminate finish wasn't quite the same as that on the rest of the worktops.  The difference was so slight that I was happy to let it go, especially since the long worktop was on the other side of the room to the rest of the worktops, but she was adamant that it had to be put right.  So another, expensive custom-made worktop was ordered and delivered - and was found to have the same ever-so-slightly-non-matching finish as the first replacement.  Cut a long story short, after the customer services manager of our local store had even on site to see the problem first-hand, Ikea eventually admitted that they had changed the laminate finish between the time when our first worktop was made, and the two replacements.  I can't remember whether they offered to replace the other worktops so that they would match the replacement one -  I think by that point we couldn't have faced any more disruption anyway.  The final resolution was that they took away the second replacement worktop at no cost, and gave us a bit of a refund on the total cost as compensation.

 

The lesson from these two incidents is, I think, that you can't rely on Ikea products remaining unchanged over time, even when the name stays the same.  And you certainly can't rely on them making it clear if they do change things.  All of which is a tad unhelpful for a manufacturer whose range contains a large proportion of essentially modular self-assembly products which customers might reasonably expect to be able to reconfigure over time.  But I guess that's one of the things you find out when you buy cheap.

 

Overall, though, we are happy with the various bits of Ikea stuff we've bought over the years.  Our oak (yes, it is solid oak) dining table & chairs are still going strong, the garage is well furnished with Ivar shelves - and my layout lives on top of a run of three-high Kallax units.

 

* He did tell me which product they were spares for, but foolishly I forgot to note it down at the time and I have now, of course, forgotten.  Which means I'll be faced with the whole performance all over again if we ever end up in the same situation at some future point.  Nor can I help anyone else who encounters the same problem with that useful information.

Edited September 4, 2018 by ejstubbs

[The Johnster]

Had problems finding my way out...

[melmerby]

Ah, but Ikea worktops are deeper than the norm

Which means you are stuck with Ikea

With our last 3 fitted kitchens the worktops haven't come from the same place as the cabinets because the cabinet supplier's selection was rubbish.

Our current Kitchen is B&Q but the worktops came from a specialist worktop supplier that had a huge range as did that 2 kitchens ago.

The worktops we pick are usually higher quality than the cabinets.

 

Keith

Edited September 4, 2018 by melmerby

[Welly]

Had problems finding my way out...

I hated the feeling of being a lab rat in the IKEA maze during my one and only visit (Nottingham branch) 15 years ago. But I have been informed that the Meadowhall IKEA is laid out like a normal furniture store.

Edited September 6, 2018 by Welly

[Ron Ron Ron]

One problem that they've created for themselves in recent years has been making changes to long-lived and popular ranges.  The well-known example being the Expedit storage system, which they replaced with the lighter-build Kallax.  Although they retained the internal sizing ....

 

 

A real shame they discontinued the Expedit range.

The Kallax replacement is very much an inferior product.

 

Expedit was available in real wood veneer finishes (natural Birch was very popular), but if looking for a wood look finish, Kallax only has wood effect foil wrap.

 

The Kallax internal sizing is much reduced too - down from 455 x455mm to 335 x 335mm per bay.

 

 

.

You can still store vinyl albums in them...just less of them in each bay.

[chriswright03]

Only when they had no meatballs and my then Swedish girlfriend kicked off in store!

 

 

I kid you not.

 

 

 

Jason

I tried their meatballs once and that was once too many.  Oh and they are made in Turkey so being Swedish has nothing to do with them.

[melmerby]

 they are made in Turkey so being Swedish has nothing to do with them.

That's Interesting as they contain pork and Turkey is a Muslim country. Seems like the last place to source them from.

Halal pork anybody?

 

Keith

[chris p bacon]

That's Interesting as they contain pork and Turkey is a Muslim country. Seems like the last place to source them from.

Halal pork anybody?

 

Keith

 

Turkey is Secular . . . at least it's meant to be but the Dictator Erdogan is bulldozing Attaturk's legacy.

[melmerby]

Turkey is Secular . . . at least it's meant to be but the Dictator Erdogan is bulldozing Attaturk's legacy.

Officially yes, but are the 0.2% of non-Muslims who have little influence or business interests likely to be producing pork meatballs?

 

Keith