Why people stopped shopping at IKEA At its peak, IKEA was selling nearly €48 billion worth of merchandise a year across more than 460 stores around the world. The company was so dominant that it sold one of its iconic BILLY bookcases every five seconds. But recently, something changed. Revenue started shrinking for three years in a row, profits dropped by a third in one of those years, and IKEA began doing something that once seemed almost unthinkable: closing stores. So what’s happening to one