It’s funny that they blame higher wages and “investment costs” (whatever that is) instead of political uncertainty and a bad consumer outlook.

Cant mention the B word.

Some heretics blame the last eight years of "austerity" for the decline in the UK retail sector.

Who could predict that freezing wages and squeezing people's incomes over an extended period would result in them spending less money in shops?

Scot Dutchy wrote:Cant mention the B word.

Bankers?

That is one B word.

Haha, increased wages. What a load of shit. No-one's had a payrise in 10 years ffs.

They have totally misjudged the market. The old guy dies and people take their eye off the ball.

I remember seeing an interview with an Ikea exec saying that they deliberately ripped off British customers when they first entered the UK, because there was no competition. Maybe they're finding it a bit harder to turn a profit nowadays now there are other players in the market.

I'm With Stupid wrote:I remember seeing an interview with an Ikea exec saying that they deliberately ripped off British customers when they first entered the UK, because there was no competition. Maybe they're finding it a bit harder to turn a profit nowadays now there are other players in the market.

Who is the competition? Ikea is a pretty unique formula. It could be just hitting saturation point. The people with any money have bought all the flat packs they want. Here there has been no increase in the number of shops here but very few actually continuously buy from Ikea. Mostly young families and students as a starting point. All my Ikea stuff I bought when I moved in here as disappeared replaced by far better quality goods and I think I am not unusual.

Well that's the same as here. Most customers are students and young people starting out. The competition IWS was talking about is retailers like Wyfair, Dunelm, the Range, Made, Furniture Village, Home Bargains and so on. There's a lot more choice now, some of it even cheaper than IKEA.

Ok I never knew Fall thanks. Not being in that market anymore. It was a handy stopgap but that stuff does not last. I seriously dont know where people buy furniture these days. I am happy I dont need too.

I've still got an Ikea bookcase and coffee table, they're solid wood and should last basically forever. All the other stuff we had, bed, chairs, lamps, etc. eventually fell apart. Oh, and two cotton bathroom rugs. Things are 15 years old and still fine.

I have an IKEA table beside me now, it's probably about 10 years old. It's one of those which has a removable lid and an interior for storage, lattice design. TV shows seem to like it. I keep seeing it everywhere. Still as good as the day it was bought. This one, in fact.



Solid wood, which has mellowed with age and exposure to daylight.

If I were to guess, I reckon IKEA's profit margins on self-assembly furniture are really low. The higher margins will be on things like fitted kitchens, soft furnishings, accessories and homewares - all the things that consumers are probably not splashing out on as much when they have less disposible income after nearly 10 years of low or no pay rises.

I forgot about those cube table things, we've got two of them as bedside tables in the spare room.

Tortured_Genius wrote:Some heretics blame the last eight years of "austerity" for the decline in the UK retail sector.

Who could predict that freezing wages and squeezing people's incomes over an extended period would result in them spending less money in shops?

Well, the incomes of people other than fat cat banksters writing their own eight-figure salary cheques, or vampire tax dodging CEOs creaming off fat wedges of share options and the accompanying dividends. But these people don't spend money in places like IKEA, they bung most of it in offshore slush funds, then spend it on contracts to have penis-extension yachts built, none of which are built here.

As for the likes of the tens of thousands of nurses who have had their real incomes destroyed over the past eight years of Torycunt banditry, who might have spent money in places like IKEA if they'd not been shat on, well the opportunity to do something constructive there was tossed into the bin by the Torycunt bandits a long time ago.

But this has been a part of the right-wing agenda for a long time - the decoupling of wealth from socially useful production. In the past, if you wanted to make a lot of money, you had to provide goods and services that the populace wanted. Then came the invention of "financial services", and the development of magic money conjuring schemes involving esoteric "trading" on the stock market (read; glorified casino run by the rich for the rich), and the rich saw the opportunity to cut themselves off forever from being reliant on the plebs for their incomes. An opportunity they seized with a grip powerful enough to crush diamonds into neutron star matter.

Hence the proliferation of "offshore" money, and the vast, secretive apparatus erected to service it. Which was not only put into place to avoid paying tax, but to keep as much information about the true financial status of rich people under a cloak of secrecy that some intelligence services would envy. All the better to enable said rich people to treat themselves to mansions and yachts with their ill-gotten loot, without the true nature of their parasitic financial activities becoming public.

Of course, the trouble is that they cannot completely decouple themselves from the plebs - at some point, they have to buy food, clothing, etc, pay utility bills, that sort of thing, and some of these activities simply cannot, as yet, be done without drafting lots of unwashed plebs to do the dirty work. Though that's probably one of the nastier driving forces behind the robotisation of retail - sweep out all those unwashed serfs, especially the ones with extra epidermal melanin, and replace them with nice, shiny robots, ideally whiter than white and shaped like cartoon anime sex dolls. The move to avoid seeing an actual human being when paying bills was neatly solved by Direct Debit, of course, but in the drive to insulate themselves ever further from the lower orders they've always despised (in no small part because of that past dependence thereupon for income), is pushing developments that are, at bottom, sinister.

The robotisation of retail is the Next Big MoveTM in the class war plans of the rich to divorce themselves from needing the poor. And, as said decoupling continues apace, along with the insulation from normal human contact and the ease of dehumanising the 'other' arising therefrom, the rich will be able to move on to the logical conclusion of this process - erasing the hated plebs from the surface of the planet wholesale.

In short, the version of Skynet you have to fear isn't the one in which AI has gone rogue, but the version that remains fully under the control of the rich.

Well I know a way they could have built the store a lot cheaper....

John

Where was the <delete> on this bloody forum?

John