I’d like to start this post by saying the staff are IKEA Wembley/Neasden/wherever the check-in app thinks it is, are universally lovely. They’re polite, helpful and mostly know their stuff. They also smile a lot if you’re nice to them because I suspect it doesn’t happen very much.
The customers on the other hand are mostly the sort of people you could imagine frequenting Mos Eisely space port in Star Wars, which was described by a certain O. W. Kenobi as a “wretched hive of scum and villainy”. People have tried queue jumping, interrupting me when I’ve been sat at a computer with a planner and I’ve even been run over by a trolley piloted by someone who probably shouldn’t have a driving license (assuming they even did). I’ve experienced first hand how rude customers can be to the staff, one after another after another, and it depresses me. Lord knows what it does to the people that actually work there.
Even though the staff are lovely, the process of buying a kitchen and then collecting the stuff isn’t brilliant. We decided to get an IKEA kitchen as it worked out roughly a third of the price of the equivalent from either Magnet or Howdens. Even after we sourced sinks and worktops elsewhere, it was still about £2,500 cheaper and we don’t have a big kitchen by any stretch of the imagination.
In order to buy a kitchen, or even one individual kitchen unit door at IKEA, you need to:-
- take a ticket in the kitchen area and wait for someone to be free to serve you; (5-70 minutes)
- queue at the tills to pay for your kitchen related stuff; (10-40 minutes)
- queue at the customer collection point to pick the stuff up; (20 minutes to 3 hours!!!)
- queue at the customer returns point to arrange collection of oversold items* (30 minutes)