New Ikea store in Russia to miss Christmas cheer

Fire-safety officers have shut down Ikea's new furniture retail mega mall in provincial Russian city of Nizjni Novgorod for 30 days. As a result the Ikea store that opened less than a month ago and the 150 shops attached to it will miss out on the lucrative Christmas season.

Jeff Kershaw, a retail-sector analyst with CB Richard Ellis Noble Gibbons, estimated in the Moscow Times that a shopping complex as large as the 150,000 m² Nizhny Novgorod mega mall would take in roughly $37 million in an average month. For every day that the mall is closed, it would therefore stand to lose some $1.2 million.

This is not the first time that one of Ikea's mega malls in Russia had to close its doors for the busy December period. In 2004, fire officers cited concerns about a gas leak to order the closure of Ikea's mega store at Chimki, near Moscow. There were unconfirmed rumours at the time that the real reason was Ikea's refusal to grease the local bureaucratic wheels with bribes.

This time around the closure at Nizjni Novgorod was triggered by local anger over the death of five-year-old child in a bizarre accident. A shopper lost control of a shopping cart loaded with almost 200 kilos of building materials, hurtled down a walkway between floors and smashed into the victim.

Meanwhile, Ikea will be hoping for happier news from the Swedish town of Haparanda on the Artic Circle. The company hopes its most northerly store in the world will attract about 1 million shoppers a year from four countries in the area -Sweden, Finland, Russia and Norway.