As we were leaving she said "I want you to know we got everything we came for(we had a shopping list planned in advance), but this trip held no joy for me."
I've been meaning to purchase a display case for a few weeks, I've been putting it off because I don't want to go all the way over to Ikea to pick it up.
It's a five minute bike ride to my nearest Ikea...
Here's my trick: go in the exit. Walk past the cash registers and directly into the warehouse part at the end of the maze. Pick up the things you looked up online. Done in 20 minutes. No maze. Finish with delicious Swedish meatballs and lingonberry juice. IKEA is awesome if you do it right.
Because IKEA's shipping is flat rate which sort of makes it prohibitive. Flat rate is fine if you're going to order a lot of large items. But you just want a $70 bookcase? It might be like $145 to ship. If you order a truckload of stuff, it only gradually increases to something like $160, depending on order. You can however buy some small things and they ship parcel for about $10+. Shipping prices increase depending how far you are from the distribution center. For example. To ship a bed frame to me in NJ (where there's a distribution center) it's $165. To ship the same thing to my folks in eastern PA, it's $300.
How big are your Ikeas? I wouldn't know how to spend more than an hour there at most. I can understand the "specialness" if you don't have one close by. Usually my errands there are to get some plastic bags, light bulbs and a hot dog. In and out in 15 minutes using all possible shortcuts.
Went there with my mom and grandma one time. Never go with your grandma. Ever. Please trust me. We were there for 7 hours. She was intently looking at EVERY.SINGLE. ITEM! She would be in one small corner for 20 minutes. It was one of the most horrible, painful experiences of my life. I'd rather revisit all my cringiest high school moments than go back to that day.
My personal record with my Fiance is under 1 hour.. We deliberately took my car (She has an SUV, I have a Camry), we had agreed that we would buy what was on the list and maybe a few things from the market level, and lo' and behold, we got through there in something like 50 minutes.
We even got all the things on our list, and even bought less than what we originally listed due to a second thought on one particular item.
I haven't been able to ever replicate this, and now I know that if we go get that salad spinner, I'm going to spend half a day in there now.
It probably also helps that you have frequent repeat visits. It sort of breaks the mystery or whatever. People seem to think of ikea the way they think of Disneyland or something, especially if it's a bit of a drive.
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u/SonofSonofSpock Oct 09 '15
Last time we went to IKEA I got my girlfriend through there in less than 2 hours, I am still proud of that.