The Enshittification of IKEA
Remember when IKEA was good? I know, everyone joked about the labyrinthine shop layout and how you ended up with more in your big blue plastic bag than you had planned, but overall it was good. You got decent stuff for affordable prices and the shopping was a family experience. Complete with either a full meal or at least a snack at the end (or even both).
Nowadays every single aspect of IKEA sucks.
Not only have prices increased over the years but the quality seems to have gone down as well. With everything made from real wood getting flimsier and flimsier and real wood products becoming rarer.
Availability sucks, too. Back in the day you browsed through the (paper) catalog beforehand and you could be pretty sure to be able to just go to your nearest IKEA and just pick it up. Nowadays it's entirely random what is and what is not available.
IKEA used to be really good at systems. You could start small and over the years add to and reconfigure your furniture. By simply staying in the same system like “IVAR”, “Hemnes” or “Pax” you could recombine and extend everything into near endless possibilities.
Today products seem to be introduced and discontinued on a weekly basis. You might have bought something last week only to find that the same color is no longer available this week. You want to replace one of your broken coffee mugs? Sorry we don't have those anymore.
Even when you order stuff online, it is not unusual that parts of your desired furniture are unavailable. Sure you can buy your whole kitchen at IKEA, but you might end up with a kitchen missing the countertops for a couple of months.
Back in the store, even when you found what you wanted, you still have to deal with the checkouts. Regardless of the time and day of the week, most checkouts are closed. Even most of the self service checkouts will be closed in favor of their new method where you need to use their app to scan all the products. It doesn't speed up anything – on the contrary: people are slower on their phones than with a dedicated bar code scanner. But of cause corporate can now track individuals with each purchase…
How about Food? Everyone's favorite meatball dish has been through many, many iterations over the years, with the meatballs having reduced in size and the side veggies seeming to change every year. It's still your best choice with other options having decreased in quality much more in my opinion. Hot dogs have doubled in price, but you can order by touchscreen now. Progress!
Worst annoyance in the restaurant are the drink dispensers where they changed machines with 5 nozzles and 5 buttons to ones with a single nozzle and a shitty touchscreen. Not only are drinks now cross contaminated, queues are also longer. Because where the old machines let two, sometimes three people pour drinks simultaneously, now everyone has to wait in line. It doesn't help that the touchscreens are unresponsive crap. But I bet the data collection is great.
And then finally there's the service. You think you can just pickup a new trap for your sink because it's common between all IKEA sinks? Maybe in the past. Now it's a replacement part that has to be ordered and is a whopping 40 EUR plus shipping (while a similar one, but of course not fitting for an IKEA sink, costs 10 EUR at the hardware store).
And god help you, if you need to return something. Be prepared to spend literal hours in the service area after you dutifully got a number from another touchscreen device. Said device will ask you about your type of required service and based on that put you in a different range of numbers. Only that all of them are serviced by the same staff. It has no purpose other than more data tracking.
Of course the service area is totally understaffed. Be happy if half the service desks are staffed. Naturally you can also book appointments online, because that improves the data tracking and again connects identities to purchases. And of course those online appointments are handled by the same staff, making wait times for everyone else even longer.
Oh did I mention that you will stand while waiting for service? Not because IKEA doesn't have any idea how to make a space comfortable, but because they want you to give up. And when you finally do, they will know that they were successful, because they have that number and the reason you provided when you touched that virtual button. An hour ago, when – still reminiscent of an IKEA long gone – you expected some actual service…