note to Ikea

Dear IKEA,

Please understand that I have the utmost respect for the operation you have going. The size, scale, and complexity of it all is a joy to behold. However, it's an idiosyncrasy of mine to find problems in systems - loopholes, inefficiencies, ways to scam. It's just the way my brain works and I've been that way since I was a young tot.

I have shopped in your stores many times and never until today have I found a problem. In fact, when I notice little things, like how the picture frames and other little items in your room displays are tagged on the bottom with room codes, so that when the unavoidable happens and someone moves the item into another room or to the cashier's station, your little minions will know exactly which room is missing a piece of its display, I am genuinely impressed.

Why then, IKEA, do you allow your patrons to wait for upwards of two hours in your customer service department clutching their deli-style numbers so that they can return a pair of ill-fitting blinds, or a chair that didn't fit into the nook that was envisioned? Those idle, annoyed bodies could be shopping or at least getting some exercise walking along the corridors of your fine store. I'm sure, given a small random probability of making a purchase per unit of time perusing your wares, that in the time you have them waiting, these circulating bodies would actually spend as much or more money than the value of the goods that they are attempting to return, should you devise a system that injects them efficiently back into The Maze for the duration of their wait.

This is how it works, in a nutshell:
1 - Minion meets customers slogging merchandise back into the store for a return at the Customer Service (CS) entrance.
2 - Minion takes the cart or basket, affixes a large number onto it, and gives a numbered electronic doo-dad to said customer, a la The Olive Garden.
3 - When the CS queue length approaches the customer's number (according to your current staffing guidelines, this would be about 2 hours later), transmit a signal to the doo-dad so that it beeps and tells the customer to get their no-good arses back to your customer service department. With the magic of computers, you can optimize the buffer time Tb, but as a good starting point, I will choose 10 minutes. So, at T - 10, you instruct customer to begin the trek from The Maze back to C.S.
[As an optional extra credit task, you could even send an update, through the power of Electro-Magnetism, to all the people in your store with a do-dad, letting them know their individual remaining estimated wait time. So if they were eyeing the Swedish meatballs but weren't sure they'd have the time, they would then realize that they had time to sample all of the delicious items in your cafe before being customer-serviced - imagine the joy this would induce.]
4 - Customer then finishes their wait (bounded from above by Tb) physically in the waiting room of customer service, where they can enjoy being coughed upon by snotty nosed toddlers but hopefully not trampled on with carts and pointy bits as those have been removed from general circulation within CS in Step 1.

I do understand your position that it's best not to make this returning process too enjoyable for the nefarious customer, lest they choose to make it habit. However, with the system I have described here, you stand to gain as much as we do and hopefully neither of us will go insane in the process.

Efficiently yours,
Sarah M