You know the ritual. You move into a new sharehouse, and the termite-infested, increasingly mouldy furniture you’ve been putting up with for the past year demands replacement. You all hop in the car and make a pilgrimage to your nearest IKEA, where you will spend the next several hours purchasing flatpack bedframes and those weird cube cabinets.
Well, this could be the end of all that. IKEA has been notably resistant to the idea of online shopping, clearly preferring that people actually go to their labyrinthine stores. It’s big money obviously: who hasn’t bought one of those stupid picture frames when wandering around an IKEA? Also, meatballs.
No longer. IKEA Australia is trialling a new online store which they hope to get out there by the end of 2016. This is ahead of an anticipated global launch of an online store within the next two years.
They’re also trialling smaller stores in select metropolitan locations – an alternative to the absolute monster that is, for example, the store in Tempe, Sydney, which basically looks like an enormous fortress. They’ll have less stock, but might make for less of a time-consuming experience.
To make their new online ambitions even slightly plausible, the company is building a $155 million 70,000 sqm multi-function distribution and logistics centre in Marsden Park in Sydney. That’s large and expensive, and sounds like it’ll be absolutely packed to the brim with kitchen tables and that one bedframe that literally everyone has.
Source: Sydney Morning Herald.
Photo: Getty Images.
