IKEA has a sneaky way of getting you to buy things you didn’t know you always wanted. Usually, those things cost under $100. But in Britain, the company is now selling customers a much more expensive impulse buy, at a price point closer to $10,000: solar panels.
By the middle of next summer, all 17 of IKEA’s stores in Britain will offer thin-film solar panels to customers, the Guardian reports. They’re not exactly cheap: The simplest system costs 5,700 British pounds, which is about $9,200. But during a pilot project, an IKEA store not far from London sold one of these systems every day.
We’re not always fans of IKEA, but there’s a lot to take away here. Britain’s not exactly known as a sunny place, but even on this grey island, solar power can work. And people will invest in it, especially if there are government subsidies involved. But it helps if making that investment is easy. And that’s what IKEA is good at. That and selling furniture for college kids and divorced men.
