The Curious Case of the Shop That Won't Let You Leave: What IKEA Understands About Customer Journeys

The Curious Case of the Shop That Won’t Let You Leave

What IKEA understands about customer journeys that most businesses completely miss

There is a moment during almost every trip to IKEA when I have the same thought.

How do I get out of here?

I came in for something perfectly innocent. Perhaps some glasses, a lamp or one of those little things you didn't know existed until IKEA thoughtfully pointed out that your life was apparently incomplete without it.

Forty-five minutes later, I am somewhere between bedrooms and wardrobes with absolutely no idea where the exit is.

I can see arrows.

I can see other slightly bewildered customers.

I can probably see a stuffed shark.

What I cannot see is daylight.

For most businesses, deliberately making it difficult for customers to get from A to B would be considered terrible customer experience.

At IKEA, it is practically the business model.

Which makes this week's case particularly interesting.

Why does a customer journey that contains so much deliberate friction work so well?

And, perhaps more importantly, should the rest of us learn from it or run screaming in the opposite direction?

At the Scene

An IKEA store is not really arranged like a normal shop.

Officially, the typical store contains a showroom, followed by the Market Hall, self-service furniture area, checkouts and food areas. IKEA itself describes its showrooms as places where furniture is presented in complete room settings rather than simply sitting on shelves.

That distinction matters.

If I walk into a conventional furniture shop looking for a lamp, I can usually find the lighting department, compare lamps and leave.

IKEA has another idea.

Before I reach the lamp, I may walk through somebody else's imaginary living room.

Then their kitchen.

Then their bedroom.

I see a desk tucked neatly into a tiny corner and start wondering whether my office could look better. I notice storage underneath a bed. Then some shelves. Then a plant pot.

I came looking for a lamp.

I am now mentally redecorating a house I don't even own.

This is not accidental merchandising. It is a customer journey designed around discovery rather than simply completing a transaction and customers appear remarkably willing to take the journey.

In its 2025 financial year, IKEA's largest retailer, Ingka Group, recorded around 736 million visits to physical IKEA stores, up 1.3% on the previous year.

Clearly, millions of people haven't yet been sufficiently traumatised by the search for the exit.

Gathering the Evidence

Here's the cool bit. IKEA doesn't simply show you products, it shows you possible futures.

A sofa sitting in a warehouse is a sofa. Put that same sofa in a carefully designed room with cushions, lighting, shelves, rugs and a coffee table and something changes.

Now you can imagine Sunday afternoon on it.

You can picture friends visiting.

You can imagine your own living room looking slightly less like somewhere you've been meaning to sort out for three years.

The product has acquired context and context is incredibly powerful.

Customers frequently struggle to imagine what buying something will actually change.

Businesses give them features, specifications and photographs, then expect the customer to perform the final piece of mental work themselves.

IKEA does much of that work for them. It doesn't just say: Here is a small dining table.

It effectively says: Here is what a small flat could feel like if you had this dining table.

That is a completely different proposition.

Solving the Mystery

I think there are actually two customer journeys happening simultaneously inside IKEA.

The first is the obvious one, the functional journey. Enter store → find product → collect product → pay → leave.

If IKEA optimised entirely around that journey, the ideal store would probably look like a warehouse with excellent signage.

Efficient.

Fast.

And rather boring.

Instead, IKEA has designed another journey around it.

The discovery journey. Enter → imagine → discover → reconsider → combine → buy.

That journey deliberately creates detours and this is where I think customer experience thinking sometimes gets itself into trouble.

We have become obsessed with removing friction.

Fewer clicks.

Fewer steps.

Less waiting.

Less effort.

Usually, that's sensible, but not all friction is bad.

Some friction creates discovery.

Some creates anticipation.

Some helps customers make better decisions.

Some makes an experience memorable.

The real question isn't:

"How do we remove friction?"

It is:

"Which friction is helping the customer, and which friction is simply helping us?"

That's a much more useful question.

The Friction Test

Here's a simple framework I'd use.

Every piece of customer effort belongs in one of three categories.

1. Value friction

The effort adds something worthwhile to the experience. Exploring IKEA rooms takes time, but customers discover ideas and products.

2. Necessary friction

The effort exists for a legitimate reason. Providing measurements before ordering a fitted kitchen, for example, requires customer effort but improves the eventual outcome.

3. Lazy friction

The customer is doing work because the business hasn't bothered to remove it.

Repeating information you've already provided.

Searching for a phone number.

Completing an unnecessarily complicated form.

Waiting without knowing what is happening.

That isn't part of an experience. It's admin outsourced to the customer and businesses confuse these three forms of friction all the time.

There's another clue

Even IKEA recognises that customers don't always want the grand tour.

Its own shopping guidance points customers towards store maps with shortcuts, while its app can help people navigate stores and locate products.

More importantly, IKEA itself is changing.

Alongside traditional large stores, the company has been developing smaller city locations, planning points, digital shopping and other formats designed to make IKEA more accessible and convenient.

That's fascinating.

Because even one of retail's most famous customer journeys understands something crucial. Customers need different journeys on different occasions.

Sometimes I want inspiration.

Sometimes I want the lamp.

Great customer experience isn't forcing everyone through the same beautifully designed journey. It's recognising the job the customer is trying to accomplish today.

The Case File

The Clue

IKEA makes customers walk through far more of its offer than most retailers would dare, yet hundreds of millions still visit its stores.

The Evidence

The journey doesn't merely create effort. It creates inspiration, context and discovery. Products are presented as solutions to real-life situations rather than isolated objects.

The Verdict

Friction isn't automatically the enemy of customer experience. Pointless friction is.

The Next Move

Take one customer journey in your business and examine every piece of effort you're asking customers to make.

Label each one: Value. Necessary. Lazy.

Keep the friction that improves the experience. Explain the friction that's necessary. Get rid of the friction that exists because nobody has bothered to fix it.

Open Your Own Case

This week, investigate three questions:

Where are we making things easier for customers when slowing them down might actually help them make a better decision?

Where does exploration or discovery genuinely add value?

And most importantly:

Where are we congratulating ourselves on having a "process" when we've actually just created work for the customer?

IKEA's lesson isn't that you should make customers walk through every department before they're allowed to buy something.

Please don't.

The lesson is more interesting than that.

The shortest customer journey isn't necessarily the best customer journey.

Sometimes customers want speed.

Sometimes they want discovery.

The clever bit is knowing which journey they are on