IKEA Shinjuku — Local services in Tokyo

I'm a huge IKEA fan, so I was very excited to check out the Shinjuku IKEA! I've already been to a few of the compact city IKEAs (including the San Francisco store and the Harajuku store in Tokyo), so I thought I knew what to expect. Unfortunately, the Shinjuku store turned out to be a huge letdown.

When going to an IKEA, I always enjoy eating the meatballs at the restaurant, or browsing through the various artfully arranged products showcasing how they might look in real life, but it would seem that the Shinjuku IKEA’s designers were on a quest to completely deconstruct the very idea of an IKEA, eschewing all of those things in favor of strange and disjoined experience that felt less like an IKEA and more like some strange third-party IKEA item reseller.

Instead of a restaurant, the Shinjuku IKEA offers microwaveable meals that you have to microwave yourself after purchasing them in the normal checkout line, a process so unusual that another person randomly approached me and asked me to explain it. There are no places to sit and very few places to stand (only about 3 tables).

The organization was also extremely unusual; while there did exist some amount of categorization, I felt like many products were semi-randomly scattered across the 4 floors of the store, with dead ends and closed paths everywhere. The store somehow felt both cluttered and empty simultaneously.

Overall, if you're in Tokyo and want to visit IKEA, I highly recommend visiting the Harajuku location! But, stay away from this one, unless you want to experience the world's most...

It’s interesting to visit an IKEA location that is far from home. I reside in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, and this was my first trip to Japan. My friend who was hosting me needed a new coat rack to replace one that was broken. While she was at work, I volunteered to make my way to IKEA to find an appropriate replacement. This location was easy to find, beautifully laid out, and the prices were affordable. The people were very helpful despite the fact that I speak only about a dozen words of Japanese. I was able to make myself understood well enough to purchase what was needed and was on my way after a brief time. Unlike other IKEA locations that I have visited in other countries, this one is on multiple floors. As with any IKEA store, it has a vast array of things to buy. Perhaps because Japan is tighter on space than I’m accustomed to in the United States, however, this location did not seem as overwhelmingly huge as IKEA stores that I have seen at home. It was possible to visit every floor and see everything that was available in the store within about an hour, without being exhausted! Instead of a negative, this is actually very positive. In the much larger stores that I have seen elsewhere, the selection was so vast as to be overwhelming. Here, it seemed like it was the cream of the crop, and I found exactly what I needed in a short time. Excellent location, great staff, I have nothing but...

We went there for a bed and delivery. All went well, but only until we paid...

The delivery guy who was supposed to call the morning of the delivery day (planned between 17:00 and 21:00) or the day before to tell us the time at which he'll be here. He called at 16:30 to say he's arriving. Since too early, we weren't home yet and the delivery guy refused to come at the time we agreed on saying we'll have to wait 3 more days to get our bed. So now we're sleeping on the floor because of their inability to do their job.

I called the support which told me I have to wait 2 weeks instead of 3 days. The 2 people i got on the phone didn't care at all about the delivery guy not doing his job and basically called me a liar.

I expected way better from the support service since Japan is very well known for its great customer services. But at ikea, it's different, the worst support service i ever encountered!..

Don't go to that shoo! It's expensive on a lot of things and people don't care about the customer... Nitori offers way better products and the staff cares about the customers. So you should go there instead!

From an extremely disappointed and...