#SMALLAND IKEA FREE#

At the Ikea in Round Rock, Tex., parents receive a beeper and are paged when their child’s time in the play area is up. Ikea says parents are not allowed to leave the store after dropping off their children at Smaland. “You can only imagine what the parent is doing.” When that happens, she said, “My husband and I look at each other and say, ‘I can’t wait till he can go into the ball room!’ “ “They say so and so, come into the ball room to pick up your child,” Ms.

For the adults, the goal is to get a table in the part of the cafe adjacent to a small play area where Murphy can entertain himself while they keep an eye on him and catch up on the day’s events.Įvery so often, an announcement is made over the store’s speaker system. “We’ve been doing it since he was born.”īecause Murphy is too small for the ball room, the evening usually begins with a stroll through the aisles, using one of the strollers provided by Ikea, then a visit to the children’s section so Murphy can play with the toys, and eventually a stop at the cafe for Swedish meatballs or ice cream.

Hall, who writes a travel blog called Two and a Half Travelers, where she has recommended the store as a rest-stop for families on road trips. “It’s a very creative way to get a night out and see if you can capture a little social life,” said Ms. Kristy and Matt Hall of Jersey City make regular visits to the Ikea stores in Elizabeth and Paramus, N.J., with their 2-year-old son, Murphy.

#SMALLAND IKEA FREE#

“At a time when families are cutting back on vacations and restaurant visits, an outing to Ikea suddenly sounds quite attractive especially when you throw in free baby-sitting and cheap food,” said Natalie Berg, a senior retail analyst at Planet Retail, a London-based consulting group. Sales for the private Ikea Group, which is notoriously tight-lipped about financials, were up 5 percent in January, according to a February article in Retail Week, a trade publication in Britain. While many of the nation’s home furnishing retailers have been suffering from sales declines, and some, like Costco’s two Home stores, are closing, Ikea has managed to eke out some profits. This low-pressure retail strategy, combined with Ikea’s reputation for selling low-priced furniture, seems to be working. “They’re getting out of the house and we’re providing an environment that gives them a break.” Moms or dads who time it right visit on days that Ikea is offering one of its free breakfast promotions and score bacon and eggs for the family, too. “Lately, we’ve seen an increase in a lot of new parents,” said Yumiko Whitaker, public relations manager for Ikea’s Orange County stores in California, where some have been spotted dropping children off at Smaland and then heading to Ikea’s cafe with their laptops for its free wireless. The company has 37 stores in the United States and 297 worldwide. Ikea estimates that Smaland attendance has jumped roughly 20 percent so far this year in its stores in major American cities. Rotino have begun to frequent Ikea for the playtime itself, depositing their children at Smaland and plopping into a display couch for an hour of peace and quiet, and then leaving without ever buying a thing. But recently, stores say, more parents like Mr. The idea behind Smaland, of course, is to distract the children for long enough to let parents shop, possibly spending more than they would if their children were jumping on the display beds or whining about being bored.

Smalland ikea