Hi, I’m Colin.

This past Friday Eliza and I drove to Paramus, New Jersey (about a two and half hour drive) to visit with my sister, brother-in-law, and niece and also to buy some stuff at Ikea.

Our hopes were to purchase a new desk and lamp for my office, as well as a few bookcases for our living room. At least, that was our goal, until we stepped into Ikea.

First of all, whenever a “store” is on a street of its own name, you should know what you are getting into. After pulling up to Ikea on Ikea Drive, we entered into the building or “hanger” as it could be referred to. Ikea is big. For those that have never been to an Ikea, and want to figure out relative scale - think of 3 Wal-marts stacked one on top of the other. Toss in about ten thousand neatly placed products in showroom display form, add a buffet or two, then take on a home depot style pick up area - and you’ll get a sense of this thing.

I’m not quite sure if our not buying anything we set out to buy was due to simply by being overwhelmed by choice, but it was certainly a factor. I wanted a desk, of which they had dozens of models and over 100 separate attachments and configurations and color choices. In some ways this is great, because you could literally build the desk you wanted. In other ways, it causes an aneurysm, due to the possibilities flying around in your head.

Our bookshelves were a tough fit. Eliza had some specific requirements for the bookshelves (due to our living in an apartment and having limited space), and us having some very specific uses for the shelving. I am pretty sure that given the proper amount of time (about 2 years), we could find what were were looking for in the shelving department.

For shopping experience alone, not many “stores” can hold a candle to Ikea. Ikea sets up a display for each product they are selling, and practically every part of each display is for sale - including the flooring. This makes is very easy to see how the product will look once setup, in a given environment. It’s like a furniture and product zoo, and everything has a price tag. Yet, to be able to take all of that in, would take many many hours.

I’m not trying to make any points with this note, just that Ikea is big. We went, we saw, we didn’t buy anything. We’ll go again.

[tags]ikea, shopping, new jersey, paramus[/tags]