What Does It Mean To Ask A Swede?

Chapter Six 1:

To ask a Swede is if he or she has ever been to an IKEA is like asking an American if he or she has ever heard of baseball or football. The answer is yes. Growing up, most of the furniture is my homes have been bought at IKEA (or competitor Mio). Growing up, all my beds have been bought at IKEA, and if you were to walk into my room in Stockholm you would find that 80-90% of the furniture has been bought at IKEA. Besides visiting their Swedish power center at Kungens Kurva (south of Stockholm), I am a frequent customer at their Barkarby store (north-west of Stockholm). Most IKEA stores have the same or very similar layout, and my favorite spot would be the cafeteria; I love their Swedish meatballs. One should to avoid IKEA on

IKEA allows its customers to browse the stores (with little or no attention), pick up the products, and assemble the products themselves. Although this is a disguised scheme of transferring business expenses to the customer, this allows the customer to freely engage in shopping and “creating” a piece of furniture. I remember growing up and spending entire days assembling furniture with my mom, dad, brother, and my sister. Assembling furniture was a family activity, and as a child, I remember feeling proud of having assembled a piece of furniture myself (of course with some parental

By doing this IKEA is able to minimize shipping and handling costs. Furthermore, this allows IKEA to transfer the assembling task to the end customer, which is another way IKEA is able to maintain low costs. IKEA is indirectly making the customer pay themselves – time is money – to assemble the furniture rather than doing it for the customer. Third, IKEA rather than asking its vendors to supply low-cost products, “designs to price” (128). This way, IKEA pressures their suppliers to constantly keep material costs to a minimum without sacrificing design. Fourth, IKEA makes use of de-skilled-low-wage labor in developing countries. Although IKEA has attempted to maintain fair working conditions, supply chain management is not easy, and in places such as Vietnam “enforcement of environmental and human rights regulations is notoriously haphazard” (137). By de-skilling the production and services offered by IKEA, they are able to hire low skilled and cheap labor for most production and sales functions. Finally, IKEA through careful placement of its retail outlets is able to attract people from large regions. According to Shell, “the chain has a policy of relatively few stores” and “most are enormous.” IKEA is usually located outside large cities where