In our recent tour of IKEA's store in Brooklyn, we kept thinking back to a 2011 lecture from Alan Penn of the UCL Bartlett School of Architecture.
Penn and his assistants analyzed IKEA's layout by following customers
through one of the enormous stores. He was surprised to find an
extremely uniform and efficient customer flow.
"If you shop in IKEA, all you do is follow people around the store,"
Penn said. "You very seldom find people going the other direction."
In fact, Penn realized, there was something very clever going on
here, ultimately leading to higher sales. As he concluded in his lecture
slides:
