So you think IKEA is a wholesome shopping experience the entire family can enjoy? Maybe you’re right. But perhaps you’re saying that as an individual who’s only heard rumors about the mammoth stores—never setting foot inside one yourself. Or perhaps as someone who’s never assembled a piece of their furniture in which you’re left with two extra screws. Are they truly extras, or will your Billy Bookcase collapse under the mass of your complete James Patterson collection?
My wife and I recently embarked upon my first ever visit to IKEA. Presumably, Phoebe decided we should go on the first day of my vacation in case we got lost in the maze and weren’t found for a week. While most stories I’d heard centered around the infamous IKEA meatballs, the remaining anecdotes were about its never-ending maze—how you’re forced to snake your way through the entirety of the store even if needing only a single item. Slithering along the snaking road, ushered forward by projections of arrows onto the ground from above. IKEA makes one reminisce of God ushering Moses and the Israelites toward the Promised Land.
Moses never made it. Will you?
There are 52 IKEA locations in the United States, and more than 400 more spread across the globe. Their average size is around 300,000 sq. ft., with the largest in the States being a 456,000 sq. ft. mammoth in Burbank, CA. The world’s largest is a 5-story, 699,654 sq. ft. goliath in the Philippines. Combined, these IKEA stores can expect upward of 1 billion visitors each year. With this many people visiting the stores, unwholesome shenanigans are bound to be commonplace.
Nearly a billion visitors each year! Undoubtedly at least a few of those folks have had the idea to race through the mazes. Perhaps a single lap for time, or the greatest number of laps in a single day. A search for that perfect balance between speed, and avoidance of the sparsely apportioned employees. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover some underground organization exists, compiling these records that Guiness refuse to authenticate. Imagine stepping out from the lavatory of your dreams, only to be run over by a guy sprinting through the Bathroom section without so much as an appreciation for the fine selection of bidets.
If you plan on traveling internationally, a trip to IKEA may be a good place to start. Not to learn about the use of bidets or to purchase luggage (although IKEA sells both), but to practice reading maps. These stores are so massive, they not only have overhead maps positioned periodically throughout the store, but also offer paper maps. Maps, people! Recall the pre-GPS days of staring at a paper map as you struggle to gain your bearings, all the while knowing you’ll never be able to properly re-fold that dastardly thing. IKEA will remind you of those dreaded memories each time you navigate around a not-so-happy couple huddled in front of a map—lost, scared, tears streaming down cheeks.
Next to the displays of paper maps hang paper tape measures, presumably to determine if that bidet will fit in your throne room. I can only assume the tape measures are constructed of paper so nobody can use one to strangle their partner after she consults a map, realizes she forgot to get a rug to put in front of your new bathroom accessory, and demands you backtrack 5 sections. Paper also staves off the construction of a noose that could otherwise be tossed over one of the rafters that stretch to the horizon.
Additionally, IKEA offers those little golf pencils, allowing you to mark items you want to pick up at their massive Self-Serve Furniture Area just prior to checkout. Golf pencils serve as a reminder that it’ll likely take you longer to get around IKEA than it would to hack your way around 18 holes. Once you’ve lost all hope of ever reaching the exit, you can pencil your last will and testament on the back of your tape measure, fashioning a commendable—but probably not legally-binding—scroll.
Those maps show the locations of a few shortcuts to speed your way through the store. Each is like traveling through a wormhole—a theoretical hole in the fabric of space and time allowing faster than light (FTL) travel. Physicists have speculated about the legitimacy of FTL travel for decades. Billions of dollars have been spent on research at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, and on theoretical physicists sitting around, pondering such possibilities. Who knew the technology had already been developed in Sweden? No wonder the Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded in Stockholm. Just imagine your child or spouse unknowingly passing through one of these Swedish wormholes—it’s possible you’ll never see them again!
What is possible, and highly probable, is sexual encounters occurring within the store. With the sheer vastness of IKEA—considering all its nooks, crannies, beds, closets, etc.—it would surprise me if a single day has gone by when at least one sexual act hasn’t occurred within an IKEA somewhere in the world. Imagine frantically searching for your 8-year-old son in the Children’s Bedroom section after he was lost through a wormhole. Instead of finding your child, you eye some dude’s bare ass gyrating atop a Star Wars-themed bedspread.
IKEA: “Where Tinder Dates Meet” since 2012.
It’s understandable how a first-timer could be more than a little disappointed—or even appalled—with the IKEA experience. It’d be difficult, however, to complain about the “Swedish Restaurant & Café” or the “Swedish Food Market & Swedish Bistro.” Unless they’re out of yogurt cones. (Which they were!)
When you’re finished with your tray of tasty, well-priced food from the café, you’re instructed to put the remains onto a shelving platform—not into the garbage. I saw more than one nearly full meal of perfectly good food just sitting there waiting to be disposed of. If I were an unhoused individual, I could think of few better places to get a plethora of perfectly good food for free.
Once word circulates among the unhoused community nearby, though, the supply of uneaten food won’t meet the demand. Soon, your meal at the halfway point of your IKEA tour will be taken straight from your plate as a scraggly bearded fella asks, “You ain’t gonna eat this, are you?” Energy levels of shoppers plummet. The final leg of your shopping experience is fraught with hypoglycemia, fatigue, and exhaustion. Fully fed, however, the unhoused population will make IKEA their “home” during all operational hours. From living on the streets, to 300,000 sq. ft.
IKEA: “Where American Dreams Are Made” since 1985.
So you still think IKEA is a wholesome shopping experience the entire family can enjoy? Those meatballs! So good, you’ll usually finish them before you’re even seated. Buy a couple bags to go, too, because IKEA’s not a store you’ll visit all that often. You wait until your list is about the length of one of those paper tape measures, then you undertake your venture and methodically cross items off with a golf pencil. Throw in a teaching opportunity about the birds and the bees, a few lessons about death, physics, and the housing crisis, and you’ve got a wholesome day your family will not soon forget. So, I guess, yeah, come to think of it . . . You’re Probably Right.
[049] June 02, 2022