Almost everyone seems to know about IKEA. If you’re one of the few people who doesn’t know what IKEA is, or hasn’t been to an IKEA, it’s basically a huge corporation that is famous for providing an extremely large array of furniture and household goods for unbelievably low prices. I’m from Louisiana, and we seem to be one of the only places in the United States that don’t have an IKEA. Of course, I’ve heard of IKEA, but I had never actually been to an IKEA until this summer.
A few of my friends and I were moving into an apartment before the school year started, so we were going to need to get furniture for the first time since we all lived in a fully furnished dorm last semester. I had no expectations prior to going into the IKEA store, only a goal to find low priced furniture that would hopefully last me a long time.
Since I expected an IKEA store to be overwhelming, I decided to pick out all of my bedroom furniture online earlier in the summer and have the items delivered to my apartment through IKEA’s delivery service once I got back to New York. Sounds pretty simple right? Well, this process didn’t go as smoothly as I expected.
A worker from IKEA emailed me the day before my scheduled delivery date to designate a four-hour time slot for when they would be delivering my furniture. The next day, I waited at my apartment for the delivery person, and a couple hours into the time slot the driver called me to inform me that he was a few minutes away. Once he got to my apartment, he quickly brought all of the boxes inside and had me sign some papers, then he quickly rushed outside and left.
My mom was at the apartment with me when the delivery man came, and we were both puzzled about the number of various boxes that were sprawled out across my room. We assumed that all of the boxes were there for the bed frame, chest of drawers, and desk that I ordered. There were so many boxes, everything had to be there…right? Well, we were wrong.
We didn’t realize that we were missing boxes until we had a worker from Task Rabbit come to help us assemble all of the items. She put together the bed without any issues. Once she started on the chest of drawers; however, she realized we were missing a box that contained half of the drawers and a bunch of random extra parts that were needed to finish the chest of drawers. She decided to leave the chest of drawers halfway completed and moved onto the desk. Once she started gathering all of the items for the desk, she realized we were missing all of the legs that connected to the table top. Seeing that we were missing drawers and the half of the desk that makes it functional, IKEA really must not have been very careful when they put together all of my items for delivery.
I tried to call the customer service number for IKEA right away when we found out we were missing almost half of the boxes, and my call wouldn’t go through because there were too many people calling IKEA at the time. I waited a few minutes and tried to call again, but the same thing happened. For the next few weeks, I tried to call IKEA at different times of the day, and I would get further into the call sometimes, but then they would hang up on me before I got to speak to an official worker. I tried emailing them also, but no luck.
School was about to start, and I needed a desk to be able to do my homework, so my mom and I traveled on the subway and the bus for over an hour and a half to the IKEA in Brooklyn to get the legs for my desk and hopefully the missing drawers. We then waited in a line to talk to in-store customer service about the missing boxes, but after a 5-minute conversation, the worker told us there was nothing they could do in store, and that the only way to solve this issue would be for us to get in contact with IKEA’s online customer service. We decided to just go ahead and purchase the legs for the desk at the IKEA store and not purchase the rest of the drawers needed for my dresser, and we instead chose to continue trying to get in contact with the IKEA customer service online.
Finally, a month later, I received an email back from customer service at IKEA. They told me they would deliver the missing boxes free of charge and pick up an extra box they had accidentally delivered to me. A few days later, I got a call for when the delivery service would come.
Indeed, the delivery man came, but he could not find my apartment. He called me about 10 times total and he would repeatedly tell me he was going to a different address that was not my apartment, and I would tell him where my apartment was and that I was standing outside on the steps. He simply was incapable of finding my apartment building even though he had the address. I walked around my neighborhood and found him on the other end of the street on the other side of the road, and I had him follow me with the boxes to be delivered to my home. I told him the situation and asked if he was supposed to take my other box that IKEA wanted back, but he refused to take it. The delivery service man this time was incredibly rude to me and my roommates when he got to my apartment with my boxes. But, at least now I had the missing boxes needed to finish my dresser drawers, but I still had to keep this extra box that IKEA would supposedly pick up during another four-hour time slot of their choosing.
Now, two months later from the original delivery date, I have all of my furniture assembled for my bedroom, but I still have the extra box stowed away for whenever IKEA decides to take it back.
I still think that IKEA has great furniture for their low-cost price point. My roommates and I purchased almost all of our apartment furniture and decorations from IKEA and are satisfied with what we have. I would not recommend for anyone to use the IKEA delivery service because there are too many issues with it. If you decide to bring the boxes back with you, but you have too much to carry, either take an Uber XL or rent a U-Haul for the day.
I will continue to buy furniture from IKEA if I ever need more, but I will never recommend their delivery service to anyone.