<i>IKEA has the added challenge of copycats. Brazen customers are known to come in with carpenters armed with measuring tapes to make replicas.</i><p>Wow. That's a great indication of how different the Chinese economic landscape is: it's cheaper to hire a carpenter to build you furniture than it is to buy it at Ikea.
<i>"I see you every week in this mall. I don't like you shiftless layabouts. You're one of those fucking mallrat kids. You don't come to the mall to shop or work. You hang out and act like you fucking live here. Well, I have no respect for people with no shopping agenda. "</i> -- Mallrats<p>I see no reason to suggest that this behaviour is somehow unique to the Chinese/IKEA combination.
The brand awareness is great, but the question is, how do we get people to open up their wallets and spend money?" said Linda Xu<p>Ikea China is like a dot com company! :)
At least they're not using Ikea as a substitute for welfare:<p><a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/1,1518,392850,00.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.spiegel.de/international/1,1518,392850,00.html</a>
I'm guessing this doesn't hurt IKEA much. When time will come for those people to change furniture, there's little chance they'll go somewhere else. And even in such a visit they will leave money for food, drink and small purchases. Overall it's worth the extra customer. They don't even form large queues.
Reminds me of the people in India who pay $4 to sit in an airplane that goes nowhere just for the experience.<p><a href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1675373,00.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1675373,00....</a>
Well, these people even enhance the IKEA "experience":
<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=770127" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=770127</a>