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Allow me to be utterly clear about something: IKEA sucks. I hate it. I fucking hate IKEA. I hate IKEA. I hate the place. I will never shop there again.

Let me tell you why. Let me tell you why you should never buy a thing at that God-forsaken place. Let me tell you why—spffft! spffft! spffft!—I spit on that goddamn Schaumburg IKEA.

The curse of MALM

At the end of September, in preparation for my move into a new apartment on October 1^st into the City of Chicago proper, I dropped a lot of cash on a lot of new IKEA furniture. Bought a sofa, entertainment center, wardobe, dining room table, chairs, bed, and some other stuff. Seriously, lotta cash. Had it all delivered—no problem there (well, they subcontract that). I came home and found about 40 flat-packed boxes of shit and 40 hours of assembly time awaiting me. Yeah, awesome.

So, priority one: the bed. Gotta put together the “MALM” model (love your model names, you coke-sniffing Swedish minimalists.) Uh, let’s see…attach side beams to base board—check. Attach side beams to headboard…wait a minute, this doesn’t work! And the thing’s damaged!

Now let me give you a bit of background on, well, me. I’m pretty good at most things, or at least acceptable, but one thing I’m terrible at is visualizing things. I mean, my visuospatial skills are a damned joke. So initially, I thought it was somehow my fault that I couldn’t get the headboard attached. The screw holes on the headboard were too big—so big that there was nothing for the screws to screw into and grip. So the headboard sat in my room for a week or so and I slept on the mattress on the floor.

Skip forward a week. I call IKEA. Wait on hold for a while. They hassle me to get help from “Anna” on their website rather than talking to real, live person. (I hear this fucking exhortation about “Why wait on the phone line when you can talk to Anna—online?” about 40 times during my various calls to IKEA. I hate that Anna bitch.)

I leave a message with customer service at the IKEA Schaumburg store. I tell ‘em, hey, uh, this heardboard don’t work. I don’t know why, but it don’t work. Oh, and it’s damaged, too. Get a call back from one of the customer service managers there. He’s all too happy to tell me I can bring the headboard back and exchange it for new one.

Mistake #1: I ain’t driving. I paid $100 for delivery, homie, and I’m not interested in driving out to Schaumburg from Chicago to return the defective, damaged headboard. Deliver me a new one.

So I call them back again, tell them the deal. No reply. Call them again, no reply. Seriously, it’s been like five days at least, I keep calling, I keep getting more frustrated. Finally I call and leave a very angry message that says something to the effect of, “I don’t know what the deal is there, but this is just pathetic.” Mistake #2: Not calling me back.

Figuring that the IKEA Schaumburg is probably just chocked full of morons, I try back to the national call center. I get lucky and talk to a very helpful girl named Monica. Monica was the best person at IKEA that I dealt with. In fact, Monica started kickin’ ass and takin names for me at IKEA Schaumburg, created a case number for me (#159-1370995, if you’re curious, IKEA), and got some stuff done. After her good work, the guy who originally casually suggested that I bring the headboard back called me back in oh-so apologetic form and said he would immediately ship me a new headboard for a queen-size MALM bed. Okay.

Mistake #3: IKEA stuff is crap. I mean, that’s not really a mistake, but it’s a fact, because as soon as I opened up the box, I knew the thing was unusable. It was damaged in seven or eight places, and not from UPS, either. I think it was damaged in the IKEA warehouse, because the cracks were not symptomatic of rough package handling.

Mistake #4: The goddamn headboard still doesn’t work. I mean, it has the same problem: the screws don’t fit. At this point, I’m going nuts. What. The. Hell? I lugged this huge box up the stairs, only to find that the headboard was (a) damaged and (b) had the same damn problem. It has to somehow be my fault, right? So I’m still sleeping on the floor. It’s been three weeks now since delivery.

Finally, I call the national call center again. This time, I explain in excruciating detail what the problem is. “The screw won’t fit in the hole because blah blah blah.” The girl talks to someone who actually puts the devil-bed together for a living, and she comes back on the line with an answer for me:

IKEA gave me the old headboard style with the new MALM bed. Twice.

Twice.

Of course it wasn’t my fault. Nothing is my fault!

But picking up that bit of information was something of a relief. At least I knew I wasn’t crazy. At least I knew the reason why the bed didn’t fit together. And now, although I had vowed I wouldn’t do this, I had a plan: I’d return the two worthless headboards to IKEA and get a new one.

This is where I really get angry.

Going back to Hell. I mean IKEA.

I talked to some girl from the Schaumburg IKEA a couple of times before I came out. We coordinated on timing and she knew that I was coming on Sunday between 5:30 and 6:00. I told her I wanted it to be as simple as possible. She had my case number and she knew my situation through and through.

Guess what? I get there and nothing is fucking ready. Nothing. I might as well have taken a number with the rest of the cattle. That was Mistake #5. I’m waiting and waiting and getting put off. Put off by her, put off by other people. I came to pick up one box. One box containing one headboard. It’s oh-so simple. They tell me that they’re “pulling the bed” because I wanted to open it up to make sure they didn’t give me the wrong one again. This takes 45 minutes. Everyone else has finished their returns. My supposedly expedited process is taking longer, due solely to the incompetence of the IKEA Schamburg staff.

“Why is this taking so long?” I ask. They feed me excuses. They tell me that they’re getting the bed. Why is it taking so long? They start giving me attitude. Mistake #6 (and it’s a big one). One girl in particular is extremely rude. (I wish I had gotten her name—had a bit of a cheap, Eastern European look about her. Look for her at the Returns area. About 19 years old.) I tell them, “Look, I’ll go pick up the box myself.” They won’t let me.

Finally it comes. I get out of there as fast as possible. I should have just walked in and stolen it. Seriously.

Other reasons to hate IKEA

• Their fake-Swedish model names that are annoying and stupid
• Their store locations (inevitably inconvenient)
• Their shitty, terribly made furniture composed of veneered pressboard. There’s a yuppie investment for you.
• The lie that their furniture is simple to assemble. Yeah, you try putting together one of those fucking Rakke wardrobes in under four hours. I’ll give you a cookie if you can.

IKEA fucks everyone over. Just do a Web search.

• Check out the long line of comments at this shitfest!
• This guy is angrier than me at IKEA! Definitely the best link of the bunch…
• The checkout process is the final straw.
• IKEA’s poor construction.
• The buggy whip inventory system.
• Neglecting to include drawers. Oh yeah, that might help.
• Poor usability (oh, that’ll hit the Swedes where it hurts!) and poor customer service at IKEA.com.
• Some strange IKEA clown. But I’m linking it anyway.

The moral of the story

Oh, okay. The moral of the story is: Tom Sherman hates IKEA and you should too. They make shitty furniture, and their customer service sucks. They’re terribly inconvenient, tiring places to shop. They’re not worth the trouble.

Add to the IKEA hate… now!

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