LAST UPDATE | 8 Jun 2020
HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE queued outside Ikea’s store in Dublin this morning, some for over an hour, as Ireland heads into Phase Two of its roadmap out of lockdown.
A large amount of shops and other businesses were permitted to reopen from today as part of ‘Phase Two Plus’, the term coined by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar.
As the Ikea store in Ballymun opened at 11am, the queue of people began to move but still exited the building and stretched into the car park this morning.
One couple, Danielle and Sam, arrived at Ikea’s Ballymun HQ at 10.05am and were about halfway towards the store’s entrance by 11.05am.
“It’s moving well,” said Danielle, who travelled to Ikea this morning to pick up some homeware and storage boxes.
As the large queue moved gradually, a number of Ikea staff members directed customers with one employee counting the number of people entering the store with a click counter.
The store’s capacity is normally 600 people but entrance is being staggered to maintain physical distancing.
Daniel Rooney had also been queuing for over an hour and came up “for a few bits” this morning but was hoping to leave Ikea “as quickly as possible,” he said.
“It’s cheap and is has everything,” he added, as the first lot of customers left with their flat packs and homeware through lifts at the other end of the car park.
“We’ve been queuing for forty minutes now,” said one woman who drove to Ikea with her housemate today.
“We just moved into a new house so we need furniture, a wardrobe, carpets, some plants maybe. We’ll see what they have,” her housemate said.
“It’s 11.30 now,” said the first woman. “I’d say we won’t leave Ikea before 2pm.”
As part of the next phase of easing lockdown restrictions, people are now allowed to travel anywhere within their own county, or 20km from their home, whichever is greater.
The Ikea queue today was well spaced out with customers standing at least two metres apart in line with social distancing requirements.
One woman, exiting the store with a trolley full of goods, said she “had a ball” in the newly reopened shop.
- With reporting by Cónal Thomas
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