Forget tariffs, IKEA slashes prices in beloved store section

Food is expensive. And essential.

There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s not like just another fashion handbag you can skip buying, comforting yourself that it’s not that chic, and that your old one is good enough.

We all have to eat, and the more careful we are about what we eat, the better we’ll preserve our health.

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Not everyone can afford nutritious meals these days, especially with the threat of new tariffs. Food prices grew quicker than overall inflation, writes the United States Department of Agriculture.

More specifically, the consumer price index (CPI), a measure of economy-wide inflation, for all food grew 0.2% from April 2025 to May 2025 and was 2.4% higher than in May 2024.

Eating at a restaurant was 3.8% more expensive in May this year, compared to the same month of 2024. Even home-prepared meals got notably more costly, which is not something that can be easily ignored.

Many retail grocery giants and supermarket chains have already raised prices or plan to, due to higher duty costs of imports.

In these expensive times, some retailers are doing the best they can to maintain affordable prices for their customers. One of them is a Swedish giant that has recently announced a generous discount for cost-conscious customers.

IKEA slashed prices at many of its restaurants and is even offering free meals for children.

Image source: Martin/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

IKEA slashes restaurant prices by 50%

IKEA recently confirmed it will slash prices by up to half at many of its restaurants globally. The temporary price cuts aim to help consumers at a time of high living costs and economic turbulence.

“Consumer confidence has decreased. People are holding on to the money that they have in their pockets or in savings,” IKEA Retail COO Tolga Öncü told CNBC.

While the starting date of the price cuts and the participating restaurant locations are not yet confirmed, the furniture behemoth announced an even more generous offer — free meals for children.

“Food has always been very important for IKEA, and we wanted to enable even more people to enjoy our restaurant offer while exploring our home furnishing range. Securing the lowest possible price for our products is always our utmost goal, and this is even more important in today’s times of economic uncertainties and cost-of-living pressures,” Öncü stated.

What’s more, last year, IKEA lowered wholesale prices by around 15%, enabling retailers to lower their price tags for consumers. These efforts cost the company about $2.1 billion euros ($2.47 billion) last year.

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IKEA is also feeling the impact of higher tariffs, which are expected to increase inflation rates, but Öncü adds the company has managed to “somewhat absorb the impact and not pass on the total impact to customers in the U.S.”

IKEA’s recent milestones and developments

IKEA said it is planning to open 58 new stores around the globe during the fiscal year 2025 ending in August.

Over the last couple of years, the giant has expanded across several states, currently operating around 50 retail locations across the country, and more than 375 IKEA stores in 30 countries around the globe.

Just recently, IKEA opened a Plan and Order point store in Oregon. This is a rather new concept that includes smaller stores where customers can get home furnishing advice from professionals.

At Plan and Order point stores, as the name suggests, there are no products to buy in-store and take home on the same day, but purchases can be made there and home delivered, or collected from pick-up points.

Two years ago, IKEA announced it would invest $2.2 billion to expand across the U.S. over the next three years, making this the biggest investment in almost 40 years since IKEA’s first store opened in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, writes TheStreet’s Fernanda Tronco.

It has already opened five locations in 2025 and plans another six by the end of the year, plus two more for 2026.