Just A Thought

As I was reading some news from the North Country the article on the chain IKEA struck me as a little bit odd. Now I've never been to an IKEA store, however, I did travel past one when I was in Edmonton once on a course. Quite a few of the people on the course just 'had to' go shopping at the IKEA as it was just "THE" store to shop at. Of course there is no such store as IKEA in Saskatchewan.

As the conversation continued on I wondered aloud why we didn't have an IKEA in Saskatoon or Regina. The answer short and sweet was the cities in Saskatchewan and the trading areas just were not big enough to sustain a quality store such as IKEA. Now if any of you have ever shopped in some of the larger stores in Saskatoon or Regina, you will surely know that there definitely is money to be spent by the customers and the better stores always seem to be packed with people.

So getting back to the article from 'Circumpolar Newsings', what the article is saying is that there just was a grand opening of an IKEA in Haparanda, Finland. Nothing new there for sure as they are a growing company. But I thought I'd just take a peak and see a little about this town with the new store. A trusty search through Wikipedia and a little information on Haparanda comes to light. What struck me immediately was the population of the place. Wikipedia states it is a center of 4700 people. Huh? That is less people than we have in Humboldt, Saskatchewan.

The end result is that I figure that the people in Finland must have a wheel barrow full of money to be able to keep the IKEA store going. Or maybe IKEA just charges so much more money when they move the store over to Canada and it takes so many more people to keep it afloat.

Interesting :)