Anyway you look at it, the Ikea store slated to open 9 a.m. on Wednesday, May 6 east of downtown Tampa has created a huge buzz. About 75 people attended a recent Tampa Electric Co./Tampa Downtown Partnership “debriefing” to learn more about Ikea’s local plans, as described by spokesman Joseph Roth.
Among the facts:
The store at Adamo Drive and 22nd Street will employee 400 people and have about 10,000 home furnishing items on site.
Built on 29 acres, the building rose in near record time, it has 1,700 parking spaces and 600 trees, and the job employed 500 construction workers.
The largest Ikea store in Florida is the 37th in the U.S., with 49 room settings, a 300-seat restaurant, and three model room interiors.
The build-it-yourself furniture retailer, even before it opened, had a Tampa area fan base of some 100,000 households, according to Ikea’s catalogue database. And that popularity is worldwide, Roth noted – he said the company’s catalogue is the most widely distributed free publication in the world.
