Yesterday evening, some sad news dropped for those of you who were looking forward to having an Ikea store right here in Nashville. The popular home furnishings store has backed out of the Music City (specifically, Antioch). Full disclosure, I’ve never stepped foot in an Ikea, but it was something I was looking forward to. Plus, it was scheduled to be built in a part of Nashville that needs and deserves a rebuild. At the very least, a little more attention.
Ikea has abruptly halted its highly anticipated plans to build a store in Nashville, according to a source familiar with the decision from the Swedish furniture company.
The move – a major blow to the Antioch neighborhood where it would have been located – comes as the popular retailer is embracing a new business model that will focus on online shopping, not the huge brick-and-mortar stores for which the company is best known.
Yeah, how many times have we heard stuff like this in recent years? Brick-and-mortar is dying a slow, painful death, and there’s no way that building these enormous meccas of furniture is sustainable. It’s just not the direction the world is heading in. I wrote about all the ways automation and online shopping…stuff like that….is effecting the landscape of society just yesterday.
But, yeah – this sucks for Antioch. I can remember the mayor talking about how all of Nashville’s resources go to the trendier neighborhoods – East Nashville, for example. For the most part, Antioch goes by unattended to as the metro area’s seemingly forgotten neighborhood. This Ikea was going to be a huge pull in starting to gentrify the area.
Ikea’s decision comes almost exactly one year after the company announced that it would build a 341,000-square-foot store in Antioch off Interstate 24, then tentatively set to open in 2020. The city committed to investing tens of millions of dollars into infrastructure changes to make the project viable.
Nashville had been rumored for an Ikea store for nearly a decade, and its decision to build in Antioch was billed as a huge boon for a part of town that has been craving a new anchor tenant ever since the demise of the old Hickory Hollow Mall.
So, yeah – we already have resources tied up in this deal. Nashville was even supposed to build a new exit off of I-24, leading directly to the new Ikea and everything. Pretty wild.
Also, shout out to Hickory Hollow Mall while we’re talking about it. Those of you too young to remember it in its heyday missed out on one of Nashville’s prime spots. I can remember being a teenager and going out there to catch movies and eat Applebee’s. One time, Brandon threw up chicken tenders in the bushes outside the mall. It’s a shame that some Nashvillians won’t have memories of the area such as that.
Anyway, at least we’ll always have the Ikea monkey.
Stoney Keeley is the Editor in Chief of The SoBros Network. He is a strong supporter of Team GSD and #BeBetter. “Big Natural” covers the Tennessee Titans, Alabama Crimson Tide football, the WWE, and a whole wealth of nonsense. Follow on Twitter @StoneyKeeley
Buy our shirt. Like us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter @SoBrosNetwork. Listen on SoundCloud. Watch on YouTube. Shop our store on Redbubble.
