What inspired me to write this rant? Let me tell you... My father was so kind to toss a little greenage my way at the holidays and I thought "well, lets get a bookcase, it will clean up the house some and be nice to have." So I went to mysimon.com and looked up a few, and found, to my dismay, that the best ones for my purposes were from WalMart.
I don't like WalMart. They're the evil flip-side of the Target coin. So, I thought, well, lets check out Ikea.com. They always have good prices in the store.
Now get me straight. I don't hate Ikea. I like them. They have good inexpensive furniture. Stores filled with neat things. Restaurants that offer meatballs. But this was to be my second foray into Ikea.com.
The last time I went there, I couldn't find ANYTHING. The website loaded slowly. The design was confusing. They seemed a lot more intent on proving what a spiffy web site they had then letting me offer them money in exchange for products. And this really gets my goat, because I do some User Interface for a living. If people can't accomplish what they came for, the website is not only useless, but it makes you look WORSE than if you never had one at all.
So here I am, fistful of money, going to Ikea.com in the hopes of giving them my money. Trying to avoid throwing money at a company I don't like for a company I do like. Do you wanna know what happens?
It never loads.
Period.
Doesn't time out, doesn't give a 404, doesn't tell me there's a problem. Just nothing ever happens.
My browser is in the background as I write this. It still hasn't gotten there. I've read the intro to a Sandman graphic novel, had the idea to make this web page and written all this in the
time it takes for their server to acknowledge that I may want to offer them money. And I'm on a DSL connection for chrissakes. Every other page on the web loads like greased lightning. Except Ikea.com.
Why am I telling you this? Because I have no one else. The LAST time that I actually got to their site, I attempted to write them a letter about how slow it was, how little loaded, the javascripts that didn't work, the way it crashed my browser, but they had no email address to mail it to. I even tried the generic addresses, webmaster@ikea.com, info@ikea.com, sales@ikea.com, and several others. All were returned to me.
This is why I hate Ikea.com. Please email this page to lots of people. Maybe someday the rubes who designed this incredibly poor facade of a webpage will see this and DO something about it. In the meantime, tell everyone to avoid Ikea.com like the plague. Because its worse than the plague. It gives you hope and then dashes it.
Now if you'll excuse me, since it STILL hasn't loaded, I'm off to WalMart to buy a bookcase.
Update: After finally getting into the website, I found they redid it and had a contact button. I sent them the address of this page and received a form letter saying they would get back to me within 48 hours. Well its been 3 weeks and no reply. It seems Ikea doesn't even care if people get so fed up with their website that they need to inform the world. Call that customer service? Cause I dont....
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So where to now?
