Ikea Customer Service Bites
Wednesday, September 08, 2004 - Topic(s) Rants
I used to like Ikea a lot, inexpensive furniture that looks good and lasts. I'm still using Ikea furniture that I bought 16 years ago in preparation for moving to Ithaca. I don't think I will ever buy anything there again. Last weekend while visiting family in Philadelphia I bought a bed for my daughter at Ikea's newly opened downtown store. Now buying a "to be assembled" piece of furniture 250 miles from home is a bit of a risk but I assumed based on my previous experience with Ikea that I'd be able to get any missing or damaged parts replaced in short order, boy was I wrong.
Last night I got around to trying to set up the bed. On opening the box it was apparent that large parts of the bed simply weren't there. In fact it didn't seem possible that all the pictured parts could ever have fit in the box. Today I spent an hour on the phone with Ikea, most of it on hold. This was on my dime thank you, no toll free number. The bed comes in three boxes. Ikea absolutely will not ship them to me, not even at my expense. The third and last person who I spoke with "ShawnWhoWouldNotGiveHisLastName" explained how it was all my fault, that there were certainly adequate signs on the display and on the bins and since the remaining boxes were too big to be shipped UPS Ikea wouldn't ship them period.
Neither my 15 year old or I remember such signage, perhaps I think too much of myself but I wouldn't describe either one of us as slow. But that's hardly the point. If Ikea cared one whit about customer service they might be just a touch more interested in keeping me as a customer then proving I was wrong. (Not to mention how a company as tech savvy as Ikea claims to be let me walk out of the store with only part of my purchase.) While I think they should ship the remaining boxes to me at no charge I would have been willing to pay some reasonable amount to get the rest of my purchase. Ikea won't even ship them at my expense however. This leaves me the option of making a special trip to Philly to get the rest of the item or making a special trip to Philly to return it, guess which I'm going to do.
It's probably worthless but I did try sending a message detailing the whole sad story to Ikea through their web site. So far not even an automated acknowledgement. Clearly Ikea like so many companys these days means "service" only in the agricultural sense of the word.
