Liz & Matt’s Home Extension Blog

a journal by Liz & Matt Coates



A Tale of Two Ikeas

by Liz & Matt Coates Oct.27.2006 1:55:20 am


OK.  I promised you a report on the Ikea experience, so here goes.  On Tuesday, leaving the girls in charge of Liz’s parents and the builders laying the final concrete screed on the kitchen floor, we hired a van and headed off to Milton Keynes Ikea in high spirits.  We arrived just before 12 and spent a little time wandering round before heading for the kitchen department.  There was just one very harassed looking assistant present and when we finally got his attention he exuded an aura of depression and general indifference.  This should have been a warning sign.  He ignored the design that we had carefully saved to their website and just asked for the printout listing the items we needed.  We managed to get some of our questions answered but went away rather deflated as a number of critical items were out of stock.  Little did we know that this was just the beginning.

In case you’re not fully familiar with the system, you need to know that most of the Ikea kitchen items are not available in the main store but have to be collected from their warehouse, which is a few minutes drive away.  The mistake we made was in assuming that the items we had requested would now be on order and would be in the process of being picked in the warehouse.  We therefore went to the restaurant for the traditional Swedish meatballs (served, of course, with chips) and then went back around the whole of the store again and bought a load more stuff, including a sofa bed, a new kitchen table and some flooring for the girl’s bedrooms.  We then went to the till, paid for everything, loaded up the van and finally went to the customer services to find out whether the missing items were in stock at any other stores.  The news was good and we calculated that, if we could get away from the warehouse in half an hour, we would have plenty of time to drive the van to the next nearest store to pick up the items that were missing.

On arrival at the warehouse, there were a few very depressed looking customers hanging around and one assistant who was making a valiant effort to suppress the panic that was clearly already rising even before he saw our two foot long till receipt.  He calmly explained that it might take a while for our order to be picked so we settled down for a long wait.  While we waited, more and more customers arrived and well over half of them were either there for the second (or in one case the fifth) time because of previous problems or had to be informed that one or more items they had purchased was out of stock or couldn’t be located.  

After about half an hour of this, the horrible reality that we would not be going anywhere else today began to dawn.  Eventually, some of our stuff started to arrive but several more items that, according to the computer, had been in stock a few hours earlier were now mysteriously unavailable.  We still managed to fill 4 trolleys and the whole process took over two hours.  We then had to go back to the store to get a refund for the out of stock items we had just bought.  After another quick dash around the store to pick up some wood for shelves and some chairs to go with the new table, we finally set off for home just as it closed at 10 pm.

The general impression we got was that the whole place was in meltdown.  Apart from the rather sullen guy in the kitchens department, the rest of the staff were as helpful as they could be in the circumstances and several of them explained that they were very short of staff and that most of their managers had left and not yet been replaced.  We finally got home at about 11pm and decided that we would have to head for one of the other stores the next day, since we didn’t want to hold things up any more than necessary and weren’t going to get a better opportunity.

Tuesday was not a good day.

The next morning Bob and Pete very kindly turned up to help unload the van and then disappeared for the rest of day since there was nothing more they could do until the kitchen floor had dried out some more.  After returning the van, we set off, in a mood of grim resignation, to the next nearest Ikea at Thurrock.  The contrast was startling.  It’s an older store and everything looks a little worn and tatty, but this was more than compensated for by the fact that the lady we spoke to in the kitchens department listened in an understanding manner to our woes, went through our plan in detail, filled in all the gaps her colleague from MK had left, explained the system to us properly, made sympathetic noises in all the right places and gave us vouchers for two free cups of tea.  We then whipped around the store to pick up a few other odds and ends and went to the till before having lunch.  With our faith in the system somewhat restored, we set off for the warehouse to collect the rest of the kitchen, hoping for a slightly shorter wait.  To our delight and amazement, everything was waiting for us when we got there and we were out in about 2 minutes. It took a little while to pack the car (which was, in itself, a minor miracle of spacial engineering) and we were home by 7 - a four hour improvement on the previous day.

To cap it all off, while we were out, the man from BT had been and we are now back on broadband, a little over a month from when the problem started.

Wednesday was definately a good day.

This morning, the builders got straight on with fitting the kitchen units and have already almost finished the job.  Even without all the cabinet doors and no work surface, it’s already looking great.  What’s more, the roofer turned up and has completed all of the cement work and most of the ridge tiles.  He also removed the scaffolding from the front so that the bay window can go in.  The weather forecast tomorrow is good, so we are even daring to believe that he might be back finish the job tomorrow.

Thursday was a pretty good day too.

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© 2006 Liz & Matt’s Home Extension Blog by Liz & Matt Coates
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