We recently purchased a home near Downtown Hamilton, Ontario. I looked I looked at about 30 homes before making my final decision. In many ways this is the perfect home for us, but the kitchen is almost bare. After debating how to go about making the space usable we decided that the best way to utilize the space and create more storage was to add an eat at Island. I looked for many Islands online before deciding to go with Ikea. Ikea offered us the option to mix and match cabinets to get exactly what we needed. In addition, they had a cabinet style the very closely matched our existing cabinetry to offer continuity. I am please with what we picked, but disappointed with the knowledge of the staff. I first needed to apply for an Ikea credit card. I got the run around and had to go to three different departments before getting the proper information. We returned to the store the next day to be approved for our card and order our products. While my partner applied for the card I went to the Kitchen dept. to compile our order. I wanted to go with delivery and the employee I spoke to informed me that since all of the items I wanted were "self serve" that I needed to go through the warehouse, get all of the items myself, check out, then go to delivery. I thought this was strange and it seemed like a lot of work for the customer. I decided to speak to another employee who told that in fact I could order all of my items with her right there and arrange to have them delivered. I am glad I pursued my hunch because this saved us a lot of work. We were then given an order form along with our approval for the credit card. We arrived at check out and none of the employees seemed to know how to process our order. No one know how to check us out using our credit card approval that had been faxed to the kitchen department by the credit card company. It took them 15 minutes to figure it out and then we checked out. I am pleased with the product that we ordered and enjoy shopping at Ikea, but this recent experience really left me feeling disenchanted. I would have expected that a company as big as this would have a more streamlined method of dealing with clients. This will not prevent me from returning, but I was very disappointed with how many employees were seemingly lacking in the knowledge and training to know how to properly deal with our situation (which I don't think was incredibly unique).
