A Journey Into the Heart of IKEA Posted 11/18/04 - 2:30 PM
They had blown a grand total of nine hours and close to a thousand dollars in a furniture store. It became a running joke for months but she remained adamant. "This isn't City Liquidators," she claimed. "It's like an assembly line. They suck you in and you can't get until you reach the cashier. Oh, and they sell really good meatballs for dirt cheap. It's impossible to go in there without buying something."
Ingvar Kamprad, IKEA's founder, is alleged to be firmly entrenched in the top ten list of the world's richest people. His empire's humble roots lead to a farm in Smaland, Sweden. As a child, Kamprad supplemented his family's income by purchasing matches in bulk in Stockholm and selling them to his neighbors. In 1943, at the age of 17, he set up a small company and created an acronym for it. The "I" and "K" were the initials of his name. The "E" stood for his parent's homestead, Elmtaryd and the "A" was derived from Agunnaryd, his home town. Kamprad sold various products ranging from pens to nylons before establishing a local mail order system. He delivered his products in an milk truck. Eventually, he moved on to furniture manufactured in local workshops. In 1951, he published IKEA's first furniture catalog. Today, it appears all over the world. One 2002 edition had a press run of 110 million copies translated into 34 languages.
By 1969, shops already over 6700 meters large, were opening in Norway and Demark. Last year, 310 million people visited IKEA's stores in 186 retail outlets scattered throughout the world. Company sales for 2003 totaled $12.2 billion. In many European homes, IKEA is a way of life. A series published in the Guardian claimed that ten percent of living Europeans were conceived on beds purchased from the furniture giant. But behind all those catalogs and mail-order couches, lies IKEA's dark side. In 1994, the Swedish press and the BBC ran stories claiming that during the 1950s, Kamprod had been involved in Nazi political activities through a Neo-Swedish fascist movement. Claiming that he had recanted his past as a "dumb kid," he quickly composed an internal memo to his employees. In return, he received a letter of support signed by several hundred workers. In 1993, a German documentary made allegations that children as young as five were stitching rugs for $4 a day in a Delhi factory. A business manager was fired and the story hit the international press before the claims were refuted as fabrications. With heavy PR damage looming, IKEA donated cash to build a nearby school and spearheading, with help from UNICEF, a program to help put an end to child labor in India. That same month, according to a 1999 Newsweek article, news reports linked the company to a supplier in the Philippines employing an underaged workforce. Ties were quickly cut but European protests resulted when the story resurfaced in the Netherlands a year later.
In Setember, on the other side of the planet, a store opening in Saudi Arabia took a ghastly turn. Three shoppers were trampled to death and 17 more injured as a crowd surged to score a few dozen $150 vouchers. A company statement later claimed that over 20,000 people turned out for the promotion.
Each IKEA outlet contains roughly the same floor plan and looks like a House of the Future exhibit in a never-built northern European Disneyland. Shoppers are placed on a course through the store's numerous wings, each devoted to a different room of the house. The "assembly-line" analogy is apt. If they venture off this set path, it's easy to get lost among literal acres of fake living rooms, offices and display-only cardboard TVs. Everything in the store had a unique name. A bed wasn't a bed, it was a "tovik." A clock wasn't a clock, it was a "fejig" and so on. Near the entrance, I scoffed at a virtual army of couches lined with neon cushions, all of them too spendy for my thrift store budget. Sometime later, as we continued to follow IKEA's white cement road, we reached a wing devoted entirely to chairs. One of mine, an amalgamation of brittle screws and flimsy balsa wood, had recently broken and become firewood. The store had two "Hermans," one black, one red, for $14.99 each.
Click on the picture to watch the sitting machine work its magic.
We passed bedroom sets straight out of Gattaca. Tiny rocket ship lamps sat on plastic night-stands next to florescent bunkbeds. One queen size bed was selling for $79. Did I need one? At these prices, did it matter?
Towards the end, the IKEA path lead into a series of subsections filled with kitchenware, lamps and other odds and ends. One display consisted entirely of arcane, plastic street signs. Each of them could go home with me for a mere $10. Twelve feet away, ice cube trays with slots shaped like stars and hearts were selling for a buck. A crate of eerie $5 teddy bears with poseable arms were drawing a lot of attention. A metal box the size of a dumpster was overstuffed with overstuffed pillows, each of them a mere $9.99. Much like a casino, this IKEA lacked clocks. Those in the actual clock section all offered conflicting times. With the exit in sight, we had somehow lost hours in this vortex. Still, the irresitable tug of rampant consumerism and unbeatable prices slowed our progress. Bags of tea lights were selling for $3.50, glasses that look like they belonged in a Chinese restaurant circa 1962 bore $1 price tags. 10 pack boxes of yellow, east European batteries? $2. Spoons? .50 cents a piece. My basket was now overflowing as I struggled to carry it, a large pillow and my vouchers to a long line in front of a flank of cash register.
Finally, we escaped into the parking lot, weary smiles on our faces. We had survived IKEA and it was time to haul our bounty o' trendy savings back to the car.
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