IKEA is a household name all across the World. All the World? No. Two small islands in the Pacific resist the trend. New Zealand has NO IKEA! Here in NZ we live without the cheap but quality goods. Especially Europeans miss their favourite furniture store.
There are hundreds of rumours around the so-called Auckland-IKEA. It’s probably more elusive than the Loch Ness monster.
Judging from the demand I see I can’t explain why we don’t have one. NZ’s furniture prices are astronomical and the quality is cr*p (if you don’t plan on spending your months wages on one chair). People even resort to fly to Sydney and go to the IKEA there and ship it to NZ. So an Auckland store would at least pull all of the north island clientele.
But on top of that reading this article it might make sense from another perspective…. meeting Kyoto.I can’t see our current suppliers of furniture being very environmentally friendly. IKEA seems to have hit the nail on the head. They are going in the right direction with their cheap but not at any cost program. And I think the consumer is at that crossroads now. We want affordable furniture (and anything consumable for that matter) but we want to be environmentally friendly and get quality stuff. IKEA falls into that category as does Apple, Toyota Prius (although that’s debatable) and others. So far I don’t see those companies not succeeding. Just the opposite.
Why is there only a small percentage of these companies? Why are consumers not pushing the obviously winning strategy? Why don’t we have an IKEA? Is there a petition somewhere? Does this need to go on a political agenda?
(linked image from Inhabitat)
Tags: climate, Environment, green, politics