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How Ikea tricks you into buying more

stu�
The home furnishings giant enlists a maze-like layout, cheap food, and crafty
psychology to get you to �ll up your cart.

Zachary Crockett February 26, 2022

On a recent Saturday afternoon, Alex Santos journeyed to his local Ikea with a
singular mission: the procurement of a new Poäng chair.

It was a simple in-and-out task. But 3 hours later, the 37-year-old IT manager
found himself in the parking lot, slightly stupe�ed, with a shopping cart full of
hand towels, throw pillows, and martini glasses.

“It’s like Ikea makes it impossible to leave with only the stuff you came here for,”
Santos told The Hustle.

He isn’t wrong.

It’s estimated that 60% of Ikea purchases are impulse buys. And Ikea’s own
creative director has said that only 20% of the store’s purchases are based on
actual logic and needs.

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Zachary Crockett / The Hustle

All of this unplanned buying has earned Ikea an enviable position in the
struggling retail landscape. As of 2021, it boasts:

• ~$47.6B USD in annual retail sales

• 458 stores in 61 markets
• 775m store visits + 5B web visits per year
• 225k global employees

On the surface, this success may seem a bit perplexing because Ikea’s way of
doing business is extremely unorthodox.

It sells meatballs and lamps under the same roof. It has been described as both
“Disneyland for adults” and “a nightmare hellscape.” And the idea of spending an
afternoon stuck in a one-way maze — then going home and assembling your
own bookcase — isn’t exactly appealing.

But these eccentricities are intentionally engineered to get you to make

unplanned purchases, and come back for more.

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Let’s start with that ridiculous store layout

In general, retailers design their stores with 3 goals in mind:

1. Intelligibility: Easy to understand the floor plan

2. Accessibility: Easy to navigate
3. A clear visual field: Exposure to products and the lay of the land 

Most companies use store layouts that give customers the freedom to explore
at their own will.

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Commonly used con�gurations — grid, racetrack, freeform, and spine — don’t

have de�ned routes: You can wander down any aisle you please, in any order you
want.

Zachary Crockett / The Hustle

Ikea breaks all of these rules.

Inside, customers are led through a preordained, one-way path that winds
through 50+ room settings. The average Ikea store is 300k sq. ft. — the
equivalent of about 5 football �elds — and their typical shopper ends up walking
almost a mile.

Want a lamp? You’re going to have to walk past cookware, rugs, toilet brushes,
and shoehorns to get there.

This serves several purposes:

1. It forces wider product exposure: At most retail shops, customers only

lay eyes on ~33% of all the items for sale; Ikea’s layout herds shoppers
past its entire catalog.
2. It creates a false sense of scarcity: When shoppers pass by items they’re
on the fence about, they’re inclined to just put them in the cart because
they don’t want to backtrack through the maze later on.
3. It creates a sense of mystery: Every 50 feet, the path breaks left.
Shoppers never know what’s around the next turn, stoking their desire to
continue exploring.

Alan Penn, a professor of architecture at University College London who has

studied Ikea’s layout, calls it a “psychological weapon” used to drive unintended
consumption.

“Going to Ikea is truly a submissive experience,” he told The Hustle. “You

relinquish control to its maze. And when you’ve done that, you’re more likely to
hand over control of your wallet, too.”

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Zachary Crockett / The Hustle

Ikea has mastered the use of a psychological principle called the Gruen effect —
when the layout of a store is so bewildering that it makes you forget the original
reason you came there, leading to impulse buys.

Jeff Hardwick, who wrote a book on the Gruen effect, told The Hustle that the
principle is at play all around you at Ikea.

“You get lost in that maze, and then you are surrounded by nothing but ever-
changing fantasies of what your life could be like,” he said. “It’s like you can walk
into a magazine advertisement and pick up the dishes, sit on the couch, try out
the desk chair. It’s very tactile and participatory.”

Lost in this stupor, you might �nd it easy to fall victim to some of Ikea’s other
tricks:

• Strategically placed mirrors: When you catch a glimpse of yourself in an

Ikea room, you’re primed to believe you belong in it.
• Contextual positioning: Rooms are set up exactly as they would be in a
natural setting. Familiarity encourages purchasing. 
• “Bulla bulla” (dump bins): Ikea places overstuffed crates of dirt-cheap
products (plush toys, slippers, pillows) along the route to reinforce the idea

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that its products are a good deal.

If you look closely, something else you’ll likely see at play in Ikea is decoy
pricing: when a retailer throws a less appealing option into the mix to make
other products seem like a better deal.

Let’s say there are 2 cabinets for sale: a $40 budget unit, and an $80 unit with
more premium materials. Ikea might create a 3rd unit — one that offers neither
the low price of the budget unit, nor the premium materials of the pricier unit —
to make the others look better.

Studies have shown that the decoy effect can increase retail sales by as much
as 14%.

Zachary Crockett / The Hustle

Strategies like this help explain why we buy more stuff once we’re inside an Ikea.

But what brings us there in the �rst place — and what ultimately dictates many
of our spending decisions — is the allure of affordable prices.

Ikea works hard to keep prices low

Ikea often follows a “price �rst, design later” philosophy: It starts with a price
target — say $6.99 for a new stool — then reverse-engineers the design process
to meet that goal.

And once an Ikea product hits the shelves, the company is militant about
maintaining, or even reducing, its retail price.

Researchers at Boston University and the Wharton School studied hundreds of

Ikea catalogs in 6 different countries between 1994 and 2010 and found that
many of the company’s products get cheaper over time. 

Take, for instance, Ikea’s uber-popular Poäng chair — a product that sells 1.5m
units per year: In 1994, it went for $179 (~$340, adjusted for in�ation). Today, it’s
$129.

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Zachary Crockett / The Hustle

The Hustle looked back at newspaper ads from 1985 and found that this holds
true with other bestselling Ikea products, too:

• The Billy bookcase — a product so beloved that one is sold every 5

seconds — retailed for $82 in 1985. Today, it goes for $50.
• The Lack side table came with a $25 price tag in 1985. Now, it can be had
for $13.

Ikea seems to adhere to a “survival of the �ttest” pricing model: If a product’s

price can’t be reduced over time, it tends to get discontinued. (There are
exceptions to this: In 2022, Ikea says it will raise its prices by ~9% to offset
pandemic-related supply chain woes.)

Zachary Crockett / The Hustle

The main ingredient of the company’s affordability is a technique called �at

packing.

The company reduces manufacturing, logistics, and ful�llment costs by

disassembling items and �tting pieces together in a box as tightly as possible.
“We hate air” is a common mantra at Ikea: Every pocket of space is accounted
for and minimized.

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“Ikea designs products with manufacturing and transit in mind from the get-go,”
said Katelan Cunningham, of the logistics software company Lumi. “They
design for the realities of the supply chain, rather than having to make sacri�ces
for it.”

Obsessive changes in packaging have saved Ikea millions of dollars:

• When Ikea transitioned its Ektorp sofa to be flat packed, it shrunk its
packaging for that product by 50%, reduced its logistics by 7,477
truckloads, and led to a 14% price reduction for consumers.
• Repackaging the Jules office chair by separating the base and the seat
saved the company ~$1.4m per year.

The obvious downside to �at packing is that consumers have to assemble their
own furniture — but even offsetting labor works in the company’s favor.

The Ikea e�ect

There’s a running joke that assembling Ikea furniture with a loved one is a
sure�re way to get a divorce.

The reality, though, is that Ikea’s furniture building model likely contributes to,
rather than inhibits, overall sales.

In a 2011 Harvard Business School study, researchers divided subjects into 2

groups: One was given pre-assembled origami, and the other was given paper to
build their own origami. At the end of the experiment, subjects were asked how
much they’d pay for the creations.

The result: Those who built their own origami were willing to pay nearly 5x more
than the non-builders.

The researchers dubbed this the Ikea effect: a cognitive bias wherein we place a
higher value on items we build ourselves, regardless of the quality of the end
result.

Zachary Crockett / The Hustle

This phenomenon harkens back to an old tale about cake mix.

In the 1950s, manufacturers noticed that powdered cake mix sales were
suffering. All the consumer had to do was add water. But this process was too
easy: It removed the effort and emotion from baking. When manufacturers took

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out the egg powder and made consumers add their own fresh eggs to the mix,
sales went back up.

Furniture and food are, of course, different beasts. But at Ikea, they enjoy a
symbiotic relationship.

Food courts drive furniture sales

Ikea may be a home furnishings store, but it also reels in ~$2.4B in food sales
per year (~5% of its overall revenue).

To put that into perspective: If you were to look at Ikea’s food operation as a
stand-alone entity, it would rank as one of the 50 highest-grossing food chains
in the world, right above IHOP.

A typical Ikea has 2 dining options that can accommodate 600+ diners at a time:

1. A Swedish food market on the main floor that serves up meatballs,

gravlax salmon, and other Scandinavian entrees.
2. A bistro near the exit that slings hot dogs, cinnamon buns, pizza, and
other fast-serve favorites.

Why, you might ask, are there food courts in a furniture store?

When Ikea’s founder, Ingvar Kamprad, originally integrated food courts into his
stores back in 1958, his rationale was simple: “It’s di�cult to do business with
someone on an empty stomach.”

But the more direct answer is that there is a clear link between food sales and
furniture sales.

In a 2012 study, researchers in Italy set out to determine the impact of Ikea’s
food courts on furniture buying. A survey of 700 shoppers found that those who
ate at the food court spent an average of more than 2x more on home
furnishings than those who didn’t.

Zachary Crockett / The Hustle

Chris Spear, a former Ikea restaurant manager who now hosts the podcast
Chefs Without Restaurants, told The Hustle that the food courts actually aren’t a
very pro�table venture in their own right.

“I was clearly told that pro�t margin was not something I should be aiming for in
the restaurant,” he said. 

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The real objective, he claims, is to reinforce Ikea’s low price pro�le of the store.

Spear said that when he worked at Ikea, it had a policy that certain food items,
like hot dogs, had to be the lowest price within a 30-mile radius. Each quarter,
corporate would send him out to assess the competition; if Costco sold a hot
dog for $1.50, Ikea would have to sell it for less.

A person might not know if $500 is a good price for a couch, but they surely
know that $0.99 is a fantastic deal for breakfast. The idea is that customers will
associate Ikea’s low food prices with the store’s other offerings.

“Ikea might be selling some of that food at cost, or even at a loss,” said Spear.
“But it’s worth it to lose money on scrambled eggs if it means helping them sell
more couches.”

Ikea declined a request for comment. But Gerd Diewald, who once ran Ikea’s
food operations in the US, echoed a similar sentiment in the past.

“We’ve always called the meatballs ‘the best sofa-seller,’” he told Fast Company
in 2017. “When you feed [customers], they stay longer, they can talk about their
purchases, and they make a decision without leaving the store.”

Zachary Crockett / The Hustle

Santos — the guy who went to pick up a $129 Poäng chair and left with a full
cart of goods — has a slightly different take on the food courts.

After falling prey to Ikea’s labyrinth of affordable housewares and spending

$297.20 more than he intended to, he stopped at the restaurant to cleanse his
guilt.

“Nothing washes away buyer’s remorse like a plate of Swedish meatballs,” he

said.

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