Obviously some are blatantly exploiting the free services of IKEA, such as parents who drop off their children at the store’s day care facility, and then take off to run errands elsewhere. The part that I found intriguing, though, was how IKEA’s relatively inexpensive food made it a meeting place for the working poor, truckers, and elderly.

A lot of poorer individuals have some money, but find the experience of going to a soup kitchen rather humiliating. For just a couple euros, they can grab baked salmon or something rather tasty at IKEA, while being surrounded by middle-class and well-to-do shoppers. Thus, the damage to ones self image is averted.

This makes me wonder how the economics of the IKEA cafeteria work out. Obviously providing good and cheap food to it’s shoppers is something that encourages people to spend more hours shopping, but does the cafeteria actually make a profit? Or instead, does the income of futon, sofa, and light fixtures simply offset the costs of the restaurant? Clearly there’s a demand for good, cheap food in a friendly cafeteria-style environment, so why hasn’t this niche been filled before?

If the IKEA restaurant does indeed have positive cash flow, but the economics are such that it could never be a standalone store, then it’s possible that the mega-giant has found a way to semi-privatize feeding the poor while also accomplishing their other goals (selling funny-looking furniture). The article tends to support this idea, since it seems IKEA is feeding so many people in Europe that it would be insane to take a loss on the food.

It’s difficult for me to imagine other stores adopting this same model, but I’m sure if there were $4 or $5 salmon plates at Wal-Mart, shoppers may be more inclined to eat there than at the in-store McDonalds.

Maybe that’s hoping for too much though. After all, IKEA is from the rather socialist Sweden, and Wal-Mart has much different origins…

Econ has always been fascinating to me. Correction: economic theory and history has always interested me, drawing graphs and making calculations makes my brain go numb. It’s a good thing I realized this early before I made econ my major…