Swedish giant Ikea has been given the go-ahead for its store in Ballymun, but will the rush lead to chaos, asks Paul Cullen
Funny how some trends get to Ireland extra quickly, while others take ages to arrive. A new Posh Spice haircut, say, or the latest drug craze, tends to make an immediate beeline for these shores, while we're left waiting for things that other Europeans take for granted - a decent health service, for example.
Ikea, the giant Swedish retailing phenomenon, firmly belongs to the latter category. The company has 254 stores in 35 countries but, in spite of years of premature speculation, Ireland isn't one of them - yet.
This won't be the case for much longer, however, following Bord Pleanála's decision this week to give the go-ahead to the company's first store in the Republic, to open on a greenfield site in Ballymun at the end of next year at the earliest.
The planning permission is subject to 30 conditions but, with the company in its initial reaction reacting favourably to the overall decision, the project now seems highly likely to go ahead.
Much of the debate about Ikea coming to Ireland has focused on the effects of a hyperstore on traffic, understandably enough given the proposed location just off the M50. Claims by opponents that the proposed outlet would turn Dublin's orbital ring road into a car park could hardly be dismissed as groundless, given the capital's already appalling traffic situation and the kind of problems that have arisen elsewhere when Ikea opened its doors.
In Saudi Arabia in 2004, for example, three people were crushed to death in the rush by customers to avail of free vouchers. The following year, there were casualties at a North London store opening as customers stampeded to pick up bargains.
Meanwhile, in the US, the opening of a number of outlets has created massive tailbacks, with police having to manually direct traffic near one Californian store for three months, and the last mile of the journey to another branch in Massachusetts taking an hour to drive at the height of Ikea fever.
The potential for traffic chaos is the reason so many conditions were attached to the Ballymun permission, such as the ban on opening before the M50 is upgraded or during the morning rush-hours.
ITS ARRIVAL HERE will hit existing furniture retailers. Habitat's prices, for example, are far higher than comparable furnishings available in Ikea's UK stores, even though many are self-assembly. But guess what: Habitat is owned by Ikea.
Ikea's blue windowless retail boxes aren't just big; they are also revolutionary. By bringing cheap, affordable furnishings to the masses, the company has transformed the way we think of furniture. Once, our tables and chairs, wardrobes and wall-hangings were family treasures, bought at great expense to last and to be passed on to future generations as precious heirlooms. Now most of us view clunky old furniture as encumbrances, to be ripped out and replaced by the bright, cheap promises of Ikea's Scandinavian minimalism. It's a philosophy of disposability that reached new extremes in 1996 when the company launched the first flatpack house.
This revolution couldn't have been achieved without Ikea's single biggest innovation - the creation of flatpack furniture. By handing on the job of assembly to the customer and minimising space requirements in transport by packing its furniture flat, Ikea was able to push costs to a minimum. And the bigger it got - turnover in 2004 was more than €13 billion - the easier it was to use economies of scale to keep prices down.
If shopping is the new religion, then Ikea is its high temple. In Britain, twice as many people visit an Ikea branch on a Sunday as go to church, according to one estimate. And, as in a church, movement in an Ikea store is strictly controlled; whereas in other shops you can go where you want, in Ikea all shoppers have to follow a route through the entire shop. The formula works; shoppers go for a table and come out with half a dozen unplanned other purchases.
Anthropologist Dr Pauline Garvey of NUI Maynooth says that Ikea is on the one hand the quintessential transnational corporation operating at "the fast-food end" of the furniture trade. "On the other, however, it offers a cultural project and has been remarkably successful in associating itself with its country of origin. Ikea/Sweden is up there with Coca Cola/the US or Sony/Japan."
From the blue and yellow logo to the Swedish meatballs on its cafe menus, Ikea sells its goods with a good dollop of Swedish sensibility.
"The company constantly stresses 'Swedish' virtues of thrift, good design and quality and this is reflected in how customers talk about their shopping experience; they talk about how much they saved in Ikea, for example, rather than how much they spent," says Dr Garvey, who is carrying out research on Ikea funded by the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences.
YET THE WONDER is that Ikea has escaped the kind of consumer anger targeted on other multinationals, such as McDonald's or Coca-Cola. It's not as though there isn't cause for concern over the company's organisation, philosophy and background. The philosophy of disposability hardly sits well with the company's proclaimed green credentials, after all, and there have been controversies over child labour and corporate responsibility.
In spite of its Swedish meatball image, the company is headquartered in the Netherlands for tax reasons and many of its products are manufactured in low-cost locations in the developing world. Control is exercised by a secretive charitable foundation worth an estimated $36 billion (€27bn), larger than the $33 billion (€24.7bn) controlled by the better-known Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; unlike the Microsoft boss, who devotes most of his foundation's resources to helping the world's poor, Ikea's Stichting Ingka Foundation gives a small fraction of its wealth to charity.
The company's reputation is for cool Scandinavian design at affordable prices, but even this description is misleading. Meeting the demands of global tastes demand eclecticism, with influence borrowed from a range of sources. The Alvine range of fabrics, for instance, are based on samples from a French textile museum, adapted in Sweden and produced in Turkey.
THEN THERE'S THE intriguing background of Ikea's founder, Ingvar Kamprad. (Ikea is an acronym of the initials of his name and home village, Elmtaryd, Agunnaryd.) As a teenager during the second World War, Kamprad was directly involved in a pro- Nazi Swedish nationalist movement known as Nysvenska Rörelsen until at least 1945. To his credit, the now 81-year-old dealt fully with this episode in his memoir and has described his involvement in the organisation as "the greatest mistake of my life".
"You have been young yourself," he wrote in a letter sent to every employee. "And perhaps you find some thing in your youth you now, so long afterward, think was ridiculous and stupid. In that case, you will understand me better."
Notwithstanding his wealth, Kamprad has a reputation for frugality. For years, he took public transport to work, while his executives shuttle around Europe on budget airlines. One story has it that if he is staying in a hotel and uses the minibar, he goes out to buy replacement bottles rather than pay hotel prices.
Not surprisingly for an organisation of its size, the company has its detractors - just key in "Ikea" and "sucks" into an internet search engine for plenty of examples. Yet it's striking that so many of the complaints relate not to environmental questions, even traffic issues, or Kamprad's past, but to customer service issues. In particular, the assembly of flatpack furniture using nothing more than an allen key and an instruction leaflet containing diagrams but no text is beyond many of the company's customers. I should know; 20 years ago, when living in Switzerland, I bought an Ikea chest of drawers and I still haven't managed to fit the drawers so they close properly.