I find furniture shopping a pain in the ass, which apparently puts me in the minority around here as Ikea is perpetually busy with customers with no particular urgency to do anything but wander around.
I needed to get a new bed the other week and have been so scarred by madhouse weekend visits to Ikea that I thought I'd beat the system and visit during a weekday lunch hour, sweeping in to pick up a quick lunch in their cafeteria. It's strangely isolated location along the 4th ring with no apparent offices nearby made me think the place would be deserted.
No such luck. The crowd noonday was actually even worse than the typical weekend -- especially the cafeteria, which did not have a single empty seat in it. So much for saving time.
To their credit, a visit to Ikea is at least efficient in the sense that everything's a fixed price and the staff are friendly, efficient and know the products they are selling. Contrast this to going to one of the massive furniture malls like Shilihe, where there's a different vendor every 10 sqm and you spend your day shopping through endlessly spotty collections of strange furniture and every transaction is a protracted negotiation.
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