Bob A.
Yelp
I'm severely revising my review of this place because apparently my period of mindless adoration has expired. I apologize to anyone who was misled by my first review into thinking the challenges of shopping at IKEA were tolerable.
This is a giant home furnishings store with a uniquely seductive design. There are some good items you might really like. In general you won't find either the cheapest or the best items, but there's a sincere attempt to hit that sweet spot in the quality/affordability range. You'll generally have to assemble whatever you buy. I don't mind that part, but it can be a tricky and time-consuming part of the experience.
There is always a long, long, long, long wait at the cashiers. There is always a long, long, long, long wait at the returns counter. And it always takes a long, long, long, long time to penetrate the labyrinthine tangle of showrooms to get to what you want to look at. And then, from there, you have to puzzle out where to track down your actual boxed items which are in a different, distant part of the facility. Because of all this, IKEA isn't just a store where you can run a quick errand. You have to carve out significant time out of your day to do anything at all.
I recently bought a floor lamp, but I grabbed the wrong kind of light bulb. All I wanted to do was go back and exchange the wrong bulb for a correct one. I waited in the unmoving line at the returns counter for ten minutes, realizing there was no hope of actually getting to the front of the line within an hour, so I gave up. Then I went to go find the correct bulb. OH MY GOD. Fifteen minutes of looking for the correct bulb by myself, followed by fifteen minutes of an employee basically doing the same thing before declaring "we have 300 of them, I just don't know where they are". So I went to a hardware store and bought one, and threw the IKEA one into a garbage can.
Back before I hated coming to IKEA, I used to like to work a meal of Swedish meatballs into my visit. You get that at the cafeteria-style restaurant on the top floor, plus they also have a lower-level cafe that sells some snack-bar items like hot dogs. And there's a little shop of Swedish groceries.
It would be disingenuous of me to omit the fact that I have about ten furniture items in my house that came from IKEA. That should tell you something. But it should also tell you something that my patience for the process of doing business at this store has worn out. I don't want to come back ever again.