Atlanta IKEA Opens Without a Glitch

POSTED: 5:25 am EDT June 30, 2005

ATLANTA -- When the Swedish home furnishings mega-store IKEA opened its doors to several thousand waiting customers Wednesday morning, the noise inside seemed almost as loud as a packed house at Turner Field when the Braves hit a home run.

Employees in bright yellow shirts chanted "Welcome to IKEA!" They clapped their "thundersticks" --blow-up tubes you usually see fans waving at NBA games-- and shouted as loud as they could.

It was the kind of jubilation only $10 woks and $4 rugs could bring.

Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin was impressed. "You can't fake that kind of enthusiasm," she said. Franklin was also optimistic about the economic activity created by the store that has more than 500 employees.

The store hired 20 off-duty police officers in anticipation of the crowds. Between 2,000 and 5,000 people were waiting outside when the store opened at 9 a.m., said IKEA spokesman Joseph Roth, who added the company does count its customers.

Although Atlanta's opening went smoothly, that's not always been the case for IKEA. Earlier this year, a man was stabbed and five others were hospitalized when thousands of customers caused a stampede at an opening in north London.

The Atlanta IKEA, located in midtown, is the third-largest IKEA store in North America, Roth said. It's the 23rd IKEA on the continent.

"I love the design and affordable prices, and there's so much to choose from," said Lori Kirschbaum of Marietta as she wandered through the 366,000-square-foot store.

Kirschbaum hustled out of bed at 5:30 a.m. to meet her girlfriends for a shopping trip they planned for months. When they arrived, there were about 200 people in line, Kirschbaum said.

"I've got my catalog. I've got my stuff picked out. When I say we've been planning, we've been planning," Kirschbaum said, leaning against a birch-colored butcher block in one of the model kitchens.

Christine Robinson, president of the Atlanta chapter of the Swedish Women's Educational Association, said the group loves IKEA because it provides comforts from home, like meatballs, coffee, and cheese.

I have IKEA shopping to do this weekend!

Keith Snyder
Brooklyn, NY 11217


To: Ikea Customer Service
8352 Honeygo Blvd.
Baltimore, MD 21236


July 18, 1998


Dear Sir or Madam,

I am taking a break from assembling my 73x73 "Expedit" wall unit to express to you my gratitude for how interesting Ikea has made my life today.

What could have been simply another boring weekend has been transformed into an adventure, the likes of which I experience only when I shop at and subsequently assemble furniture sold by your lovely company.

My first thank-you goes to the service counter, where they increased my sense of suspense by drawing out the "fifteen-minute wait" by an additional fifteen minutes! How clever! They knew I'd be doubly happy when my gray "Expedit" wall unit finally appeared.

This same impish sense of humor was evident when, after the hour's drive back home, I unboxed my gray "Expedit" wall unit to find that it was a black "Expedit" wall unit. Please forward my thanks to the service staff for sensing my poor interior design choice and taking it upon themselves to correct it.

Still chuckling over this delightful detour to my expectation, I began to assemble my black "Expedit" wall unit.

In hiring documentation writers who place clarity above simplicity, most companies reveal that they are humorless entities without the personal touch. Ikea is to be commended for their choice to create assembly instructions which not only do not use words at all -- thus allowing people who may not speak the world's primary languages to enjoy the identical experience on long Saturdays around the globe -- but which allow the illustrator free range for his own personal artistic license. A less creative, free-spirited company would balk at releasing technical drawings which show holes where they are not and do not show holes where they are, which do not explicitly show the consumer how to differentiate the side pieces from the top, nor the top from the bottom, and which have no indication of the fact that the shelves are not intended to sit atop their supports, but rather surround them. But I have learned to look forward to Ikea's droll, delightful, impressionist documentation. After all, if Seurat can create the impression of people at a French seaside using only colored dots, why should an Ikea technical illustrator not create only the impression of accuracy?

Also please thank your documentation team for allowing me the luxury of putting aside my precious projects for an hour or two of three-dimensional puzzle-solving. How did you know I so enjoy Rubik's Cube and Chinese woodblocks? I have had my black "Expedit" wall unit assembled and disassembled three times now, and I still have not solved it! A hearty congratulations to your dedicated staff-- I assemble and disassemble things all the time as part of owning a music studio, and you've managed to do what teams of Japanese, Dutch, and American documentation writers have failed to: You've got me stymied! I'll beat you on this next go-round, though; I believe I now see it. Of course, the only reason I see it is that I seem to have run out of other combinations, but a brute force solution beats none.

(I do, however, think it is not entirely fair play to hide so many of the pre-drilled holes. I can see hiding one or two, but gluing veneer over two entire sides and leaving only the faintest dimples as evidence of the holes lurking beneath them seems a bit out-of-bounds and not quite preux, wouldn't you say?)

Please also forward my thanks to whoever designed the veneer. While most consumers would be satisfied with a nice, clean, smooth, featureless gray -- oops, I mean black! -- surface, you were able to discern that I prefer to think of myself as an individualist, and would thus find such perfection boring. I'm very impressed with your foresight: Kudos to you for knowing that after the third complete reassembly and repositioning of my black "Expedit" wall unit, not a surface would remain unchipped. I am now the very proud owner of a brand new $249 shelf unit which looks as though it did not survive that last Florida hurricane. Thank you so much for allowing me to express my non-conformity through my interior furnishings.

Please also relay my gratitude to the sophisticate who intuited that six would be too symmetrical a number of plastic feet for the bottom of such a work of art, and who therefore removed one from my package, a subtle and insightful move, and one more commonly associated with the Futurist art movement than with most furniture stores. The positioning of five plastic feet into six pre-drilled holes was an unexpected and delightful intellectual and aesthetic challenge, and one which brought a wry smile and a colorful comment to my lips.

It seems I have so many things for which to be grateful that I would simply drone on forever if I tried. If you continue to give all your customers such excellent solutions to their needs -- Needs they weren't even aware they had! Wow! -- the future of your company is easy to predict. After all, happy customers are return customers.

I now return to my $249 chipped, incorrectly (re-re-)assembled, black "Expedit" weekend project. Although I would love to do this all the time, I cannot always get to New Jersey, so next weekend, as a way of replicating the experience, I am considering staying home and banging myself repeatedly in the head with a hammer.


My best regards,


Keith Snyder
Pleased consumer

GOOD LUCK

IKEA It's the only thing I ever hear about, being Swedish.

Teacher said:

She's all over in another thread, so don't complain.

[Edited 7/2/05 12:12pm]

IKEA is HAWT

IKEA rocks! It's te first and only thing I wanted to see when I went to Sweden!

Enough please

Teacher said:

I'm so sorry.

IKEA is a great place to meet women

AliG said:

Ikea is not a great place to meet men....im just saying

JuniperBeans said:

Depends on who's looking.

Heavenly said:

The hell? Only?????

Teacher said:

You call yourself a 'thing'?

Heavenly said:

I thought you did

I guess this is as close as IKEA's gonna get to SC. I'll have to take a little trip to ATL sometime soon then.

SHIT!

I wish we had one in Tampa.

The master of digging up ancient threads has struck again.

AliG said:

Hmmm....that's near my house. I might have to try that!

Imago777 said:

daaaamn, you went into the graveyard to dig this one up.