A lot has been said about IKEA in the UK – the poor quality of its flat pack furniture, the missing parts in the box when you come to assemble it, the failure to put enough staff on the checkouts so you don’t have to spend an hour getting out of the place… and so on.
Now they don’t even seem to care about delivering the goods you’ve ordered and paid for.
It seems that in the past few days their ‘system’ has had problems (its never anybody’s fault, of course) and having promised to deliver furniture and goods to HUNDREDS of customers, they simply failed to keep their promise. Many hundreds of people had their orders accepted online last week and were given firm delivery dates, arranging to stay at home all day, and many taking time off work to do so.
Of course, IKEA don’t seem able to give a rough idea of the actual time they might deliver, simply saying ‘between 7am and 6pm’ on the appointed day. This week, IKEA’s customers have waited… and waited… and waited, fearful of popping out for a few moments or going out into the garden lest they missed the delivery driver.
One such customer is a man from SW London who feared the worst, having waited in all day on Monday for delivery of his kitchen table, and at 5.10pm decided to call IKEA’s ‘Customer Service’ number. The call centre operator was very polite and almost immediately confirmed that ‘there was no tracking number’ so it was not going to be delivered that day after all. She went on to explain their ‘problems with the system’, in the past few days and admitted that it was IKEA’s fault and not Parcelforce, their delivery contractor.
When asked why someone from IKEA hadn’t contacted him beforehand to say the delivery wasn’t going to happen, she explained to him that ‘there were too many people to contact and too many calls to make’, so they simply didn’t bother doing anything. As to when they might be planning to deliver the missing goods, she could not say at all.
Naturally, when asked to be put through to a manager or someone who could take responsibility, get the item delivered and arrange compensation for his inconvenience and the loss of a day’s income, the hapless customer was told that nobody was available to speak to him. He was given the names of two ‘supervisors’ (Nicola Jenkinson and Ian Baker, who were obviously off somewhere supervising something very important), who would ring him in the next 72 hours. Note: not 1 hour, not even 24 hours, but 72 HOURS: THREE DAYS.
So why is it, in the age of ever-increasing efficiency with computers, email, mobile phones and all the other technology at their disposal, companies like IKEA cannot get customer service anywhere near right?
More importantly, why do agencies like the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) and any number of others who are supposedly there to protect the consumer from rogue traders and errant retail chains, never punish and penalise the IKEAs of this world to the extent that they would never do it again?
We can of course vote with our feet, and our unlucky customer will certainly be doing that – never setting foot, or opening his wallet, in IKEA again. He will tell all of his family and friends the story and they will sympathise and swear to do the same… but if the OFT won’t do anything to put these dodgy retailers out of business, shoudn’t we all make it our business to?
Do we want them to walk all over us as they get bigger and bigger and their wretched shareholders fatter and fatter? Or do we want something better?
The British Citizen thinks we should take positive action. We will be organising demonstrations outside stores, retailer and product boycott campaigns, petitions to the relevant government ministers, lobbying of parliament and the widespread use of the media to end this blatant disregard of consumers by rogue retailers.
Shall we start with IKEA?
Editor
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