Once upon a time, I was an IKEA fan. I shopped there, I referred many people. I was in love. Not anymore. My last experience was so dissatisfying that I may never shop there again, and I certainly won't be referring as many people to the store!
I drove down one week in my little coupe just to prove to a recent home buyer that IKEA had everything a household could need, it was great quality, and the prices were amazing. Our customer service was fine. No real problems, and the homeowner found the items he was looking for. We picked up a few items which suprisingly fit in my car. I proved my point enough to call for a second trip. Keep in mind the drive is 2 1/2 hours each way from where we are. So it had to be worthy.
The second trip was the bad one. The indecisive homeowner was already stressed from all the decisions of furnishing a house. But I had made a thorough list of all the items that we planned on picking up (of course they weren't available online, strike one). He had brought a friend to help with all the lifting and of course I had talked about how amazing IKEA is the whole way there. Finally we arrived ($12 in tolls and $50 in gas later). List in hand, we went straight to the beds. No customer service person was there to help (strike two). We stood around for 10 minutes or so before the guy finally showed up. Buying an IKEA bed is a process. We needed help deciding which components to choose. His answers were so obviously wrong (I had to let him know that you can't use an adjustable base with a spring mattress because it doesn't bend- moron). After about half an hour of discussing which size bed to get, which slatted bed base to get, and which mattress to use, we had finally decided. Turns out the bed base was not in stock. The homeowner was told by the associate that it was available online. So the homeowner went home without bed base. The first thing he did when he got home was jump online. But to our suprise, it was NOT available online (strike three). I called customer service. It would not be available for months! The only choice was to order another base. It was not the one he wanted and that type of base could have been purchased at the store that we were just at! He was furious! He had to pay $100 for shipping for an item that he wasn't satisfied with and he still had to wait over a month. I attempted a couple of calls to customer service. Then settled on an e-mail, hoping for some cooperation and a resolution. The only thing that came of it was my own dissatisfaction with their customer service as well as many lost potential clients for IKEA.
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