Last weekend, Dawn and I took a drive to West Sacramento to visit the IKEA store. Dawn has taken up scrapbooking and needed a work surface for her new hobby, and we thought “something Swedish” might work. Besides, we’d never visited the store and thought it might be a fun outing.

For those unfamiliar with IKEA, it’s an international chain of giant, blue and yellow “big box” stores specializing in the sale of Swedish assemble-it-yourself furniture and accessories. The West Sacramento store occupies 265,000 square feet on 20 acres just off I-80, and presents 50 different room settings, four model homes, a supervised children’s play area and a 250-seat restaurant serving Swedish specialties such as meatballs with lingonberries or salmon plates, as well as American dishes. One can easily spend a day just touring the store!

It’s a unique, well thought out concept, the scale of which neither of us had previously experienced. We grabbed our cart and soon learned that, to reach almost anything in the store, one is encouraged to follow the arrows on the floor which also serve to keep traffic moving in a logical and controlled, albeit slow, manner. I call it shuffling along, Dawn calls it shopping. Either way, it’s effective — considering the number of people sharing our experience, everyone and everything seemed to move smoothly.

Once we’d located the office furniture section and made our selection, a friendly and knowledgeable sales person prepared our “shopping list” and pointed us in the right direction to retrieve our items which were boxed and stored in numbered aisles and bins. A few things, it turned out, we were expected to grab and cart ourselves, while the larger, heavier boxed pieces would be waiting for us in “Will Call” after checkout.

Following the floor arrows once more, we shuffled made our way through checkout and on to “Will Call.” While Dawn waited for the larger boxes to be carted, I retrieved the Range Rover and, by the time I’d backed into the loading area, Dawn had everything ready for me to load. Another five minutes and we were on our merry way, none the worse for wear.

I have to admit, considering the voluminous quantity of merchandise, the sheer number of shoppers and the bulkiness of their orders, IKEA has the industrial engineering and customer service facets of the operation worked out well. We were duly impressed. Admittedly, shuffling  meandering following arrows this kind of shopping isn’t something we’re used to, but considering the scale of things, IKEA runs like a finely tuned watch.

Once home and unloaded, Dawn began assembling the file cabinet while I worked on the table (the cabinet, it turned out, was by far the more tedious job!) I’m always amazed at the things Dawn tackles and I’ve yet to see anything she can’t handle. It took some time, but everything went together properly thanks to solid engineering and easy to follow pictorial directions.

And in the end? Well, Dawn has a hobby work surface in our spare bedroom, and we earned our IKEA  shopping wings!