IKEA has finally come to London. Praise be to the gods of the Allan key and the foil-finished wood products.
Every year, one of the newspapers or other media outlets in the city calls IKEA’s head office and asks whether we’re finally going to get a store. Our closest location is Burlington and if you’ve been there, you know it also serves everyone else west of the GTA. It’s crazy. The Vaughan IKEA is easier to get in and out of, but much farther away from London. IKEA always responds that there are no plans to open a store west of Burlington. They need a million-population base before they’ll consider it, blah blah blah. London’s population is about 367,000. Neighbouring St. Thomas: 38,000. Add in Sarnia, Windsor, Chatham and all of the smaller towns in between and it’s darn close to a million.
But when you point that out, as I have when I’ve made the obligatory annual call, they say they don’t want to take away from Burlington’s customer base.
It seems IKEA got sick of hearing from us because they developed a completely new kind of store and the first one opens in London today. It’s a pick-up location for catalogue items. They’ll have the 100 top-selling products in stock but the rest can be ordered for a delivery fee that’s, presumably, smaller than ordering online or by phone.
When our IKEA catalogue arrived in the mail, the way it does in the rest of the civilized world, I nearly screamed with glee. (You did scream, says my husband, and it scared the cats!) I haven’t even looked through it yet because I’ve been so busy. It deserves time and attention. I like to flip through the pages and marvel at what’s new. They’re innovative and far from the cheap-crap retailer they were years ago. Welcome to London, IKEA. It’s about friggin’ time.
Sounds a bit like Consumers Distributing from days of yore but without the useless little pencils.
But those pencils were great for the golf course and you could interchange them and at one time pick up a supply at the liquor store.