Thirty years ago, shoppers were about to undergo a further transformation in the Tyneside retail experience.
Setting up shop not far from the sprawling malls of the Metrocentre, which had begun trading in 1986, the Scandinavian home furnishing giant IKEA threw open the doors of its huge new store in Swalwell, Gateshead, on July 2, 1992. The company could trace its origins back to Sweden in the late 1940s, but this was the brand's first store in our region, and only the fourth in the UK. The first had opened in Warrington, Cheshire, in 1987, followed quickly by one in Brent, London, and another in Birmingham.
Today the Gateshead store is one of 22 nationwide and a reported 378 operating worldwide. Countless thousands of us have flocked there over the last three decades to buy home furnishings and maybe even tuck into some Swedish meatballs, one of the favourites at its restaurant. And what of its flatpack furniture items? Some of its most popular all-time products include the Billy bookcase, the Poang chair, the Malm bed, the Kallax shelf unit, and the Lack side table.
READ MORE: Tyneside in the 1970s - 10 photographs
Back in 1992 it was all newfangled for Geordie shoppers - and this was retail supersized. The new store covered 15,000 square metres of one floor. It had more than 8,000 sales lines and there were 1,100 free parking spaces. The store's manager Goran Nilssen was expecting as many as 20,000 inquisitive customers on the first day, and around two million in the first year.
Mr Nilssen who had moved to the UK from Sweden also explained why the self-service and self-assembly nature of the store and its products was crucial. "In order to keep our costs down and pass on low costs to the customer, the customer takes part in the process." To this day, some find the act of assembling a flatpack piece of furniture with allen keys at the ready relatively simple - the rest of us, maybe not so.
Our reporter, there for the opening, found the new IKEA experience to her liking. "It was," she wrote, "the ultimate in one-stop shopping. So many products under one roof could be mind-blowing, but you are channelled through the shopping areas painlessly and easily.
"The walkways take you through set after set, showing you how your home could look IKEA-style. All the mock rooms are equipped with tape measures, pencils and paper - part of the store's customer-friendly approach. There aren't any vulture-like shop assistants hanging around."
And she noted: "It's good quality inexpensive gear which you won't find anywhere else. IKEA has a style of its own." All of which helps explain the store's ongoing success after all this time.
But finally, maybe there's something we've all been doing wrong for the last 30 years. We all know it's spelled IKEA and most of us pronounce it 'Eye-Kee-ah'. What we should be saying, apparently, and how the Swedes pronounce it is, in fact 'EE-Kay-uh'.
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