Destination shopping

Grandpa Ed's clock takes pride of place atop our dining room IKEA storage. Great-Grandpa George Burke bought the clock around 1880, but Ron grew up with it tick-tocking on Grandpa Ed's mantel.

                       IKEA

(Sung to the tune of "Maria," from West Side Story)

IKEA...I just shopped a store called IKEA...

And that old shopping game

Can’t ever be the same

For me.

OK, I adore IKEA. I first discovered the Swedish Wonder Store when I lived in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and shopped IKEA in nearby Woodbridge. Ron, 50% Swede himself, was skeptical that a giant furniture store could cook, but one bite of IKEA’s Swedish meatballs and he was a convert.

I had no beef with driving nearly 550 miles from the farm in Nebraska to a Chicago suburb when I needed cabinets to contain my scrapbooking sprawl. The IKEA in Bloomington, Minnesota, was a little closer, at 464 miles, but we have friends we like to visit in and around Chicago, making it the obvious choice.

I don’t know exactly what the store taps in me and gazillions of other IKEA idolizers around the globe. Perhaps it’s the promise of order imposed on a big, sloppy world by one humble Allen wrench. Maybe it’s their skill at making every shopper believe she is a design and organization genius. Could be the meatballs.

There are eight IKEA stores in California. Eight! Texas, Pennsylvania and Florida all come in a far-distant second, with three locations each. Illinois’ two locations are both in the Chicago area; the rest of Illinois can just lump it.

Eight IKEAs in California! I’m positively giddy. Yet from my new home base in Visalia, it’s still a pilgrimage of at least 179 miles, three hours’ driving time, to reach the nearest IKEA in Burbank, a suburb of Los Angeles. My next closest option is 216 miles straight up the Valley to West Sacramento. A store in Palo Alto is actually a few miles closer, but farther away due to traffic time.

So what gives? I smell bias here.

We moved here from near Stromsburg, with a population of some 1,200 people, the largest city in Polk County, Nebraska. One regional health department there serves four counties, Polk, York, Butler and Hamilton, with a total population that doesn’t quite hit 37,000 people. Maybe I can forgive IKEA for ignoring the prime commercial real estate along I-80 in York County, even for snubbing Stromsburg, the Swede Capital of Nebraska.

But here around Visalia, Tulare and Fresno Counties alone boast 1.4 million – million! – people. Throw in Kern County and the city of Bakersfield, and that population base jumps to 2.3 million.

Two-point-three million people aren’t enough to warrant an IKEA? Are you kidding me? Is it just because people around here have to drive by dairies and orange groves to reach their shopping destinations? Is it because 99 percent of the grapes grown around here end up in school lunches, not bottled behind witty wine labels? Is it a country vs. city thing? Is it urban snobbishness that keeps IKEA out of the southern Central Valley? Or is it even – gasp! – the fact that despite its prehistory as an ocean of its own, the Central Valley is totally landlocked, with not a Pacific wave in sight?

All but one of the California IKEA stores are located in coastal cities. The Sacramento store is the only location that could be considered inland, and it’s just a skip from the San Francisco Bay area.

But I can’t lay these accusations on IKEA alone. Most of California seems hardly to know that the Central Valley exists. There’s the coast, the coastal mountain ranges (where you go for all your trendy wine), and then there’s these pain-in-the-neck higher mountains you have to drive through or around to get to Las Vegas.

Omaha, Nebraska.
STORE CLERK to customer: Zip code 68666 (never mind the Antichrist stuff; been there, done that); where are you from?
ME: Stromsburg.
CLERK, smiling broadly: Stromsburg, hey! My uncle lives in Osceola. Yeah, we go to the Swedish Festival in Stromsburg every summer!

San Jose (San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, coastal), California.
STORE CLERK to customer: Zip code 93292; where are you from?
ME: Visalia.
CLERK, bewildered: Is that in California?
ME: It’s about 40 miles south of Fresno.
CLERK: Fresno?
ME: City in the Central Valley? About 450,000 people?
CLERK, brow clearing, dismissive shrug: Oh! Small town.

I did not make that up.

C’mon, IKEA. Uphold that Swedish reputation for lack of prejudice. Visalia (pop. 124,000), planted at nearly the halfway mark between Fresno (450,000) and Bakersfield (347,000) seems to me the ideal location to tap a pretty sizeable market base.

Välkommen!

IKEA responds (via email, May 24):

Hello Kate,

Thank you for your interest in IKEA. We appreciate that you have taken the time to contact us.

We are constantly in discussions with city, developers, and brokers about potential opportunities for an IKEA store. However, with only 37 stores in the U.S., we focus on new location areas to be consistent with our U.S. and global expansion strategy.

(Approximately 15-20 stores open worldwide each year and we must balance our emphasis on variety of regions and countries around the world.) 

That being said, we do recognize the customer base that would exist for us in many areas, but currently have not committed to a timeframe for opening an IKEA store in your local community.

Of course, we appreciate demonstrations of support and desire for us to enter the local community.  We continue to evaluate areas that may be appropriate for locating an IKEA store based our unique business model and size of our stores.  In the meantime, you are welcome to visit our current U.S. stores as well as to visit IKEA-USA.com.

We hope this information has been helpful and  thank you again for contacting IKEA.

Best Regards,
Jennifer
IKEA Customer Care Center

KATE says:

Dear Jennifer,

You're a sweetheart for taking my tongue-in-cheek seriously. Just boot Visalia a little higher on your to-do list, huh?

Thanks for responding!

Kate