Ikea Doesn't Want My Money

In an effort to furnish my soon-to-be new home, I hit up Ikea and had a rather negative experience. I wrote them an email and thought that I'd share it here.

I wanted to give you money, a lot of money in fact, but your staff have made it clear that you don't want it.

I've just moved to the Netherlands and find myself in need of furnishings for my new apartment. I need to fill my new home with everything from a bed, to a couch to knives and forks and so I thought it best to go to Ikea. I thought that I would share my customer experience with you.

I went to your website, which despite having the ability to display English on the Canadian site, was clearly unable to show me anything other than Dutch when on the Netherlands site. Despite this problem, I managed to spend an hour or two using Google Translate to build up a list of roughly €1500 worth of stuff to fill my new home... only to find out that in 2011, not only is your website monolingual, it also doesn't actually sell anything. I was instead directed to bring a printed copy to your store in Amsterdam Zuidoost.

But I thought: "Who am I to judge the way people do things in this country? Maybe that's just how they do things here". And so, with this in mind, I emailed the list to my smartphone, left work early, and headed over to the nearest Ikea.

But after navigating the store and finding the customer service area, your resoundingly unhelpful representative there informed me that in order for me to give you my money and get what I need, I must spend another hour or so wandering through your store, hauling heavy objects off shelves and dragging them through the checkout. Apparently, having €1500 and a list of things I'd like to purchase from you handed to a customer service representative is not enough to actually do business at Ikea.

I ask you: why do you even have a website? Why do you bother with this impression of customer service when you clearly have no interest in providing any? More importantly, why don't you want my money?

It's sad really, Ikea was my natural choice as a new arrival in this country, but you've gone out of your way to make it impossible to pay for your products.