I hate IKEA

This weekend, I hoped to be able to spend some time on my blog, writing updates and adding pictures to our photo gallery. Little did I know that I would spend the entire weekend building a wardrobe. With help from Gemma, Adam, Jaume and Toñi (in the form of delicious food she made to sustain us), the wardrobe took two days to be built. Why? A mixture of argument, unnecessary complication and sick Swedish humour (like the 5mm thing).

Example: the main wardrobe units (of which there were three) consisted of about eight or nine parts each, plus screws. Each one took us about half an hour to build. The two sliding doors, however, each consisted of about 50-60 individual parts. Each door took us about three hours to build. In the end we found we were missing one screw. More sick Swedish humour. I'm not sure that I will ever get involved in anything like that again.

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January 23, 2006 | Filed Under General 

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3 Responses to “I hate IKEA”

  1. Rich on January 28th, 2006 2:05 am

    I hate Ikea,

    Yeah, aint that the truth. I had the same problem with a lounge unit.

    But anyway, here's a story for you :- (this is absoloutely 100% true, I swear)

    I have an American friend (who shall not be named to save embarassment) who had only been here a few months and therefore with no knowledge of Spanish and zero Catalan.

    He went to Ikea (Zona Franca) to buy a sofa bed for his new apartment.

    Now, if you know the lay out of IKEA, you will know that you get to walk around and see recreations of rooms sporting the latest in Ikea luxury. Then with your handy piece of paper full of lovely product codes, you pick your goods up from the WAREHOUSE (large items of furniture etc.)

    Well, I am supposing here, that in the good ol' US of A, IKEA doesn't exist because the following happened :-

    He saw a sofabed that he liked on show to the world sat on a slightly raised platform in the center of the shop, and decided that it would be perfect. He then went of in search of a trolley to take it away.
    On returning, he tried to load the sofabed onto the trolley only to find that those cunning Catalans had bolted it to the platform.

    Not being able to ask for assistance he took out his Swiss army knife and set about undoing the screws, not noticing the strange looks he was probably getting from other consumers.
    He then single-handedly hoisted the sofabed onto the trolley and went off in search of the Till / Exit………..
    closely followed by a security guard who accosted him just as he was trying to wedge an oversized sofabed into an undersized lift ( picture this) I am starting to giggle already.
    The security guard spent about 15 minutes trying to explain "In Catalan and then Spanish" to no avail, that this isn't the way you do it.
    He soon gave up and let the crazy foreigner carry on with his mission.
    It was only when my friend got down to the basement/ checkout, did he notice all the other customers with their pieces of paper waiting for their larger purchases to be brought TO them from this enormous warehouse. This is when the penny dropped and it dawned on him what all the fuss had been about.
    He did get his sofabed in the end by the way.

  2. guirilandia on February 9th, 2006 5:00 pm

    The missing screw at Ikea thing. That’s happened to me as well.

    They say Bergman was a big joker, though you could never tell from his movies. Maybe the folks at Ikea find the missing screw prank incredibly hilarious.

  3. Fred on September 19th, 2006 8:49 pm

    I hate Ikea,

    Missing screw could be prank or human error / machine error during packaging, none the less it is a painful experience…Here is Canada, screwing customer by Ikea is not a prank..it's a reality, here is my story.

    Finally after so many years, me and my wife bought our first House, finding the right house was a challenge but finding the furniture seem to be a bigger problem, anyways, some how I agreed to have a trip to Ikea (80 KM away ), we saw a wardrop she wanted so the following week I tried to surprised her with the it….she was surprised alright….Crack on the door and glued paper all over the place……so I called Ikea and requested to have the product replaced….the will replace it if I take it to their store….I live 80 Kilometer away….I have spent three hours on the phone trying to reach someone to ask for some sort of compensation for wasting two days as well as gas / mileage…plus the fact that this wardrop weights 230 lbs…..Ikea, will compensate me with $20 in store shopping gift card………you know what I say…..you can shove that…I want my money back, as much as I hate going to Walmart, I may go there.

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