Refused - Ikea

I can't say this has ever happened to me before.

I received a letter from myself today.

On September 20, 2010, I sent a letter to IKEA about my experiences with their furniture and shopping establishment. Apparently it was refused upon receipt by IKEA.



I suppose now would be a good time to divulge the process I go through when addressing a letter.

The first place I try to look for a customer relations address is on the company website (or on the product itself if it's a goods item I'm writing about), but I couldn't dig anything up in this case. All you're given to work with when attempting to contact IKEA is a form that you have to fill out and submit online. I can respect that from a "being proficient" point of view, but it just screams automation. I prefer to know that someone has to physically open my envelope, unfold my letter, and give it a read.

My second source is a sometimes handy website called Hoovers.com. Hoovers is a profiler for pretty much every business that has ever existed. I don't subscribe to their full service, but information like corporate addresses are readily available for free.

And if all else fails, I hit up Google. Just typing in the company name along with some search terms like "headquarters, corporate, HQ, President, homebase" will get pretty solid results.

I'm not sure if the address I used belongs to IKEA still, but I've got a feeling that it does and that they refused it as soon as they saw the "Customer Relations" bit on the envelope. Even then, my experience is that the USPS would forward mail for a year, and then return it to the sender for another six months after that with a note stating what the revised address should be, such as in the case of an office branch being downsized.

Or maybe they simply refuse to read post office correspondence. It seems as though more and more companies are trying to automate or outsource their customer service responses.

I'm going to attempt to resend under an alternate address I found that's listed as the place of business for corporate IKEA in the US. We'll see how round two goes...

Dear Ikea

Dear IKEA,

I am writing you today to share my thoughts on your fine retail shopping establishment. Firstly, I enjoy the wide range of home products that your stores carry, and am often impressed with the reasonable pricing and ease of shopping for furniture goods... I've furnished multiple apartments with your products.

Secondly, I am not always the biggest fan of the quality of your furniture goods. They're not durable in a long-lasting sort of way for someone of my stature (6'2" pale white Irish-American looking man, not that looks have anything to do with it, but I'm just sayin'...), and aren't always designed to be disassembled and reassembled again. Maybe people are tinier in Sweden and have a more permanent living situation, but it seems to me that most people who buy IKEA items in the US are college students attempting to furnish a dorm room, or people that are moving out onto their own for the first time; I am an example of the latter.

I've had two pieces of furniture fail on me that I've bought from IKEA that I wanted to touch base on real quick. The first was from a couple years ago, my MALM queen-sized bed frame. The suspension rod (the SKORVA midbeam, I think) that supports the entire length of the bed tore one of the brackets out of its screws at the base of the bed when I sat down on it. Now I assure you, I am not a huge person, but am in the 200+ lbs range. It should be reasonable that this hold up for more than the couple of years that I owned it.

The second is about my POÄNG rocking chairs that I bought in December of 2009. I sat in them in the store and found them to be so comfortable that I opted to make them my primary chairs in my apartment. Over the weekend while I was rocking in my POÄNG, a screw snapped off leaving the front right edge of the seat to hang. Thinking that the screw had just become loose, I attempted to screw it back in only to see that it had been cleanly sheared off.

I wasn't immediately upset by this as I have an extra POÄNG that I was able to replace it with, but I am again disappointed in the quality of your furniture items that are intended to be laid or sat on. In both these cases, I find it not worth the effort to attempt and disassemble and return the items for exchange... especially so because I haven't saved the boxes or the receipts, and I am not familiar with the warranty on said items.

I will say, you make a mean EXPEDIT bookcase and LACK coffee table, so thank you for those. But, I will hesitate before I buy any of your other furniture items in the future. Thank you for the opportunity to vent.

Sincerely,

Daniel