Perhaps. A lot of this boils down to the question of why they're expanding now and not sooner. Ikea stores are big investments and when they started rapidly expanding in the US they may not have had confidence in the long-term profitability of each store, including reliance on the housing market and taste-driven desirability of Ikea products. (What if Americans only saw Swedish furniture as a short-lived fad?)

Maybe now it's clear Ikea has a long-standing place in American retail, so in addition to expanding the giant-store footprint they want to invest in other forms of access.

i doubt it. i think america is just huge, and that they can't responsibly expand too fast.

remember, ikea is expanding globally. on my last vacation, i saw an ikea identical to the one by my house in california, in southern germany. that's really sort of unprecedented at the scale of an ikea store.

Ikea wants 2 million people within 60 miles of a store, apparently, though they've started experimenting with smaller stores in smaller markets.

http://blog.syracuse.com/at-home/2009/11/no_ikea_here_not_ev...

> remember, ikea is expanding globally

And they're expanding mainly with their own money. They're a family-owned company without outside investors. Ingvar Kamprad is pretty economically conservative.