The rumour is rolling this week about Ikea returning to Victoria. But three decades after leaving the city, the Swedish home-furnishings retailer maintains it has no plan for a return.

In an email to the Times Colonist Jan. 15 — the day Target announced plans to pull out of the country and free hectares of retail space — Ikea Canada said while the company has expansion plans, none immediately involve Greater Victoria.

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“While we are continually reviewing our expansion opportunities in Canada, there are no plans for a store in Greater Victoria or elsewhere on Vancouver Island at this time,” said Madeleine Löwenborg-Frick from Ikea headquarters in Burlington, Ont.

She did not elaborate on whether plans include smaller, satellite ordering stores as suggested by Ikea Canada’s president.

Ikea has proven popular with Greater Victorians, who travel to the Lower Mainland for its products and even ride charter buses for day-long shopping excursions.

Social media chatter has heated up since Ikea Canada president Stefan Sjöstrand told Business in Vancouver in December it plans to open up to 10 smaller stores across Canada within the year.

He told the magazine the locations would be similar in size to a standard London Drugs, at about 37,000 square feet, or a tenth the size of a full-size Ikea, but most of that space will be for storage.

Unlike a full-size Ikea, the new “pickup” stores will have counters at which Ikea workers will retrieve items for customers who ordered online.

Some of the company’s future pickup stores are likely to include small retail areas.

Ikea hasn’t released locations, but “the pickup stores will be on the West Coast and all over the country,” Sjöstrand said. “I hope that a year from now we will have five to 10 pickup points.”

A December study, commissioned by Purolator, said 73 per cent of Canadians want to have the option to pick up online purchases in-store.

“Canadians like ordering stuff online and then picking things up in the store,” said retail analyst and Retail Insider Media Ltd. owner Craig Patterson. “It’s better for retailers to have people come into the store because then they can sell them additional products.”

Patterson said it would be “brilliant” for Ikea to open smaller stores in urban cores of both Vancouver and Toronto. The brand is well known in both cities because of the longtime presence of full-size Ikea stores in the suburbs. Both cities have plenty of urban dwellers who do not have cars.

“Smaller [footprints] is the way to go,” Patterson said. “That’s a trend in general in retail. A lot of these large-format retailers actually want to shrink.”

Steadily rising e-commerce sales now account for five per cent of Ikea Canada’s $1.7 billion in annual revenue, and all of those transactions have so far involved products shipped directly to customers from distribution centres, Sjöstrand said.

Sjöstrand said opening specialized pickup stores is more efficient than opening pickup areas in existing full-size Ikea stores because the company’s current stores are at capacity.

dkloster@timescolonist.com

With a file from Business In Vancouver