IKEA S’pore Apologises for Leaking 400 Emails & Sending an Intern-Style Email

IKEA is known for its delicious meatballs, labyrinthine-like store, and ability to make even the strongest of couples fight over a sofa.

But now, customers might have a bone to pick with IKEA themselves.

Email blunder

The Swedish company apologized to customers on Sunday (4 August 2019) after they inadvertently CC-ed 410 individual customer e-mail addresses (instead of BCC, which would have hidden the email addresses) in a promotional mail that they sent out.

One affected customer, Cherrylene Lee, received an email from IKEA about a rebate card she is eligible for.

However, 195 other email addresses were CC-ed in the same email.

A spokesman for IKEA said the error occurred last Thursday and that they “regretfully made an error of inserting 410 individual e-mail addresses in the ‘To’ field in an Ikea Service Delivery Promotion e-mail sent to our customers.”

So, all the email addresses were visible to all recipients of the mailer.

Lee criticized IKEA in a light-hearted Facebook post (which also shows that she’s, indeed, deserving of the IKEA card since she’s indeed an IKEA fan).

Heh. What a BLADVASS.

Amateurish apology

As bad as their email blunder was, IKEA found a way to make the situation worse.

Wanting to react quickly, the Swedish retailer sent an apology to the affected customers, including Lee.

Unfortunately, their apology looked like this:

One intern must be getting the rollicking of his life.

It appears that the apology email included the initial draft which was struck through.

In the email, IKEA apologized to all 410 affected customers for their “unintentional error”, for which they are “embarrassed”.

That sounds fine, but the email also included tips for the mailer.

Struck through in red, one tip read “Nicer personal IKEA tone and less of a bureaucracy”.

Asking the writer to use a “personal” tone to regain the trust of customers makes them sound like more of a bureucracy, if anything.

Another struck-through line amusingly said: “Please immediately delete the said email and do not use the email addresses for any purpose whatsoever”.

If you’ve no idea why this happened, here’s why: there’s a function in MS Words whereby you can track every single change, so if one deletes a word, it won’t disappear immediately but would be crossed out. This is useful if you’d like to revert to the previous draft.

And if you think the change is acceptable, you’d have to right-click and “accept” the change for the change to go through.

If not, the crossed text would still be visible.

Second time’s a charm

However, IKEA finally got things right and sent out what they called the “actual draft” of the apology email.

Amusingly, they had to apologize for their apology email, saying “In our haste to notify the customers as quickly as possible, we again made a mistake by sending half the recipients an internal draft of the apology notice instead, an oversight that we are embarrassed about.”

You have to hand it to IKEA. Many big organizations screw up, but not many manage to screw up their apology too.