[business lunacy] cautionary tales [3]

Ikea’s Increasingly Incredible Actions

The first and most immediate question is what I was doing in an Ikea café in the first place, rather than enjoying a business lunch at the pricey Pyramid restaurant in the centre.

Well I do go on to the Pyramid, actually, to meet a lady for late lunch but on Thursday mornings the drive into the countryside with my mate and with JJ Cale’s low-down road music warbling from the quadraphonic - it fills a niche in the weekly schedule.

At least, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Out on the edge of town, some years back, there were acres of beautiful camomile fields, across the road from enormous new housing estates. It seemed a good idea at the time so Ikea bought the land up and put in a giant warehouse, as was their wont, in the middle of a sea of giant carparks.

Joni Mitchell.

Once the brouhaha had died away and the grand opening had come and gone, my friend here decided to try the place out with his daughter. Not bad. Not bad at all. Clean, friendly atmosphere, competitively priced delicacies in the café and get this – 12 rouble bottomless coffee with food!

The two of them were hooked.

Ikea had a Swedish manager and the place was buzzing. Didn’t matter that they’d misread people’s taste in furniture over here and that the place resembled an empty barn – the restaurant was rocking. Ridiculously priced smoked salmon, quiches, meat dishes and so on – it was the only place to visit and now we did, every Thursday until the current day.

Well, we’ve seen some changes. As expected, once it became apparent that people weren’t buying the requisite furniture, the coffee shop assumed more and more importance and the deals became even better, if one could ignore their promotional deals like 5 year mugs. If you visited Ikea clutching your mug, you’d get free coffee for 5 years.

The first day of the offer there was no way to drive anywhere near the place. The road in from the main drag was lined with people clutching mugs, a line of bedraggled refugees. No one was buying furniture. Then the raison d’etre disappeared, as they made the coffee free anyway.

They also began to build a Mega complex of stores and boutiques enclosing Ikea itself. Boarding went up, blocking the view, the sound of drilling and sawing filled the air and the pleasure was halved. Still we went for the food and the coffee. Viktor enjoyed his ‘project’, as he called it – a plate of salmon, ham, bread slices, egg and lots of other goodies he’d carefully construct into sandwiches whilst I’d hoe into the lo-sos’ salmon or fricadel’niki meat balls and veg.

Space in time, it was.

Trouble in high places saw a change in managers, the Swede went home and changes became noticeable. The price of the food shot up to reasonable levels, which was still OK by us, as we still had our place by the door, flirted with the same ladies and generally had a good time.

Next week the spongy, baked-on-the-premises chocolate-chip cup cakes had disappeared, plus the usual dishes, plus the soup plus our wholemeal rolls. Viktor tried one of the rolls and his worst suspicions were confirmed. A few rapid words with the girl and yep – the supplier had been changed.

Our great favourite – creamy Russian buckwheat porridge – had gone by the time we got there and we couldn’t get there any earlier. Well, all right, we still made do. The girls and young chaps behind the bain-marie were chirpy and helpful and all was well.

Then they changed managers in the restaurant. Plus they rushed the opening of Mega. Woefully behind schedule, floors were hastily laid, roofs put up, shop facades rush-decorated and still it wasn’t ready for Open Day.

We gave what had become a quasi-religious Thursday pilgrimage away for one week and it took a lot to do that. Next week our table had been shifted and some free-standing advertising billboard wedged up against it. When I went to shift the billboard, the girl guarding it went ballistic and ordered it returned the 18cm to its original place.

The dishes were missing from the shelves, only a fraction of the bain-marie tubs had food in them but if we’d wait fifteen minutes? We waited. And waited. When the ‘project’ eventually came out, the bread slices had increased in number but had diminished in size, the cheese and ham were each now one slice less and the fish portion had halved in size. My smoked salmon was the same size but had doubled in price.

There were no teaspoons. The coffee dispensing tables had sugar and milk spills over them. There were only glazed, processed sweetmeats to be had with the coffee. There was no porridge and only the one soup.

The staff were obviously becoming used to irascible customers complaining, simply shrugged their shoulders and said there was food coming soon. We took a few inferior items and a banana and made do.

Still no one bought any furniture.

This week, today, we arrived with that ‘hope springs eternal’ attitude and immediately saw a deep emptiness everywhere that one could reasonably expect to find vestiges of food, such as at the serving counter. To our enquiries, there was the turned shoulder.

When we finally forced one of the yobs to listen, he just shrugged in the true jobsworth spirit and referred it to a large girl in a chef’s hat who simply stared at us in Buddha silence until we prised one or two words out of her with a carving knife.

We ended up with a soggy concoction which I believe was supposed to be hash browns with salmon between them but was really salmon and sawdust compote and it was awful.

Brilliant idea, like all Russian ideas - pity it didn’t work, due to the finer details having been overlooked, such as the deeply annoying habit of customers of having finely tuned palates, which they tend to do over here.

Viktor kept muttering things, best left unstated, about Russian managers and I protested that it really is not the case that once you let a Russian at a viable concern you can sit back and watch it go downhill.

But it was to no avail – we were both far from being gruntled, as PGW would have said.

The doors were blocked. The exit doors. Apparently, they’d ripped up the concourse tiled floor outside and had had to redo the foundations and re-lay everything again after the Opening debacle.

We glanced back as we departed via the circuitous detour, shook our heads and possibly left forever. As we left, we noticed no one was buying any furniture but the check out girls were having an animated discussion over some local issue or other.