[HelloNurse]

IKEA "impulse" buys aren't the same kind of actual impulse buy as unnecessary food or clothes or books when you find them; they are normally useful things one didn't remember to intend buying, or even useful things that one didn't know were available (e.g. something you noticed in someone's home but didn't know was an IKEA product).

For reasonably disciplined people looking at just about the whole store and collecting as much as possible of the intersection between what they should buy and what is available is the normal way to amortize the cost of all that walking, and planning to buy something is only a worst-case guarantee that an IKEA visit will be worthwhile.