IKEA furniture stores seem to slowly but surely be making more of a global appearance as the demand for affordable furniture becomes greater. The success of IKEA is largely in part due to their business concept by selling well designed home furnishings at prices so low that as many people a possible can buy them rather than selling overly expensive furniture that only few can buy.

Ingvar Kamprad opened the first IKEA in 1954 in Småland, Sweden. Now with almost 300 stores worldwide, many people have had a chance to shop in IKEAs and thus aided in spreading the success of the IKEA business concept and making it possible for the opening of new stores.

Considering myself a GIS-buff, I was interested in mapping the global locations of IKEA stores to obtain a visual perspective on how far the IKEA phenomenon has spread. By using Finder and Maker, I found that after making a simple .csv file in Microsoft Excel with latitudes and longitudes of each store, I was able to see where current IKEAs are located:

To see the dataset click here: http://finder.geocommons.com/overlays/5036

To see map click here: http://maker.geocommons.com/maps/624?page=1

The map illustrates that there is a large concentration of IKEAs located in the Euro area. No surprise there because from 1958-1980 most of the IKEA locations were started in neighboring countries to Sweden where the furniture powerhouse got its roots. Several other locations opened in countries such as Australia, Hong Cong, and Singapore which became IKEA franchises in the late 1980s. Presently, there are IKEAs located in 37 different countries around the world.

The following map shows 10 new IKEA locations that will open before 2009 labeled by the blue tabs:

To see the dataset click here: http://finder.geocommons.com/overlays/5354

To see the map click here: http://maker.geocommons.com/maps/953?page=1

Keep your eyes peeled…an IKEA store may be coming to a town or city near you!

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