IKEA Tried Getting Rid of the Maze. Shoppers Wanted It Back.
3 min
IKEA’s experiments with new store layouts produced a surprising result: Shoppers prefer its mazes. The Swedish furniture retailer over the past five years opened new urban stores that diverged from the typical IKEA store experience that guides customers on a winding course through showrooms devoted to different parts of the home. The new locations, located in downtowns of cities across the globe, originally looked more like standard department stores. Shoppers could take any route they pleased through the store and products from different rooms of the home were displayed together. Because the locations stock items more suited for small-space living, selected to appeal to casual shoppers and office workers, IKEA executives thought customers would want to pop in and out without having to take a long path through multiple room sets. In reality, customer interviews and feedback surveys found that many shoppers craved the guiding hand of store design, said Tolga Öncü, head of retail at Ingka Group, which operates the majority of IKEA’s stores . IKEA is consequently redesigning the floor plans and signage of its downtown locations to make them more like those of its out-of-town stores. “We thought we didn’t need to guide the customers because [we thought] the stores are so small we thought they would see everything,” Öncü said. “But it became very clear that [customers thought] ‘No, no, no, this is a big shop!’ ” IKEA declined to discuss sales results at its downtown choose-your-own path stores, but it closed early versions in Madrid, Shanghai and Warsaw, and shut its first U.S. downtown-format store, in the New York borough of Queens, in December, less than two years after it opened, attributing the closure to low visitor numbers. Customers may go to IKEA to buy one thing, Öncü said, but its traditional layout reminds them to buy items they “talked about three weeks ago, but forgot.”
The enduring pathway
IKEA opened its first permanent showroom in Älmhult, Sweden, in 1953, and in 1965 cut the ribbon on its 500,000-square-foot flagship store outside of Stockholm, the largest furniture store in Northern Europe at the time. The Stockholm building’s looping design was partly modeled on New York’s Guggenheim museum and inspired the large, meandering out-of-town stores that IKEA would go on to open around the globe. The stores’ throughway systems that make customers walk around showroom after showroom were originally designed to usher customers through a real-life version of the IKEA catalog, which was introduced before the showrooms. That design principle holds true today, said architectural historian Jeff Hardwick. “The maze ends up being appealing because you’re walking through perfectly crafted 3-D advertisements of your better life, completely immersing yourself in those spaces,” Hardwick said. The layout isn’t universally appreciated . Some shoppers say it takes too long to navigate, and others accuse IKEA of making the route so convoluted that it becomes less of a pathway and more of a trap. IKEA has tried different strategies over the years to remedy these criticisms, with varying results. It began adding shortcuts early in its international expansion so customers could jump ahead faster. Those were well-received by customers, Öncü said. IKEA then tested widening those shortcuts so they looked more like alternative routes. The feedback wasn’t so positive: Wider cut-throughs led customers to accidentally skip whole sections. The standard, narrower versions were reinstated.
Rectifying mistakes
Still, the company thought a maze wouldn’t be necessary when it came to its downtown stores. But it turned out that customers viewed the locations differently than IKEA did. “The first mistake we made was calling them ‘small stores,’” internally, Öncü said. “To [me], they are very small,” but in the eyes of a customer, not so much, he said. IKEA’s new downtown store in San Francisco, for example, covers 52,000 square feet. The average Starbucks , by comparison, is around 1,700 square feet. IKEA realised shoppers missed the maze after speaking with them via stores’ customer feedback programs. The company takes satisfaction surveys, places customer-feedback machines around stores and requires managers to speak to at least 100 customers a week, Öncü said. The overarching sentiment was “This is a big store and I want support” to shop in it, he said. A whittled-down version of the maze was introduced to IKEA’s Vienna and Paris stores in fall 2022 and early 2021, respectively. IKEA said sales are rising across reconfigured downtown stores like those in Vienna and Paris, declining to provide figures. The company is planning for similar adaptations in other existing downtown stores, including those in Mumbai and Stockholm. Its newer downtown stores, such as the one in San Francisco, have been designed with pathways from the start. IKEA doesn’t have to temporarily close stores to add in a walkway, which minimises the costs of rethinking a floor plan, Öncü said. The maze-less experiment also reinforced IKEA’s conviction that people buy more when they are shown more. “I often hear people say, ‘Why is it typical in IKEA that you leave with more than what you had planned to buy?’” Öncü said. “This is the answer to that.”
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Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
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A long-standing cultural cruise and a new expedition-style offering will soon operate side by side in French Polynesia.
