What’s not to love about Sweden? Blonde hair, vikings, the Hives, massages, penis pumps… we can all agree on these things. But what about Sweden’s biggest claim to fame, the home decorations behemoth Ikea. Does it really do a body good?

The yuppiest of the yuppie crowds have finally united within the walls of the Swedish genius supercenter of IKEA. Fashionable household products for reasonably low prices. You also can’t forget about the daycare center and the café that serves breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert.

For those of you who know, I wish the best. For those of you who don’t, I offer a warning: What can be wrong about this grand marketing scheme, you ask? Ikea is a Karma Killer in hiding.

Oh, poor unsuspecting consumer, let me count the ways:

1. Large metropolitan areas have large yuppie crowds that shop at the strategically located, large IKEA stores. This brings entire cities to shop here at any given day of the week. Fitting the millions of LA or Chicago into a single store, no matter how massive, brings on major crowd frustration.
2. The Swedish genius minds brainstormed the idea that you will give them more money if forced to walk through the entire store and look at everything. They give you eco-cool reusable (dirty) bags and crazy legged carts to enjoy while you navigate through their giant maze. Did I mention you are guaranteed to get lost at least twice? The ride begins with a transport to the top level of the store. From there you dodge fellow customers and avoid getting lost within the Pac-man walls to score points. The customer with the most points at the end of the day (surely that is how long the game will last you) wins a spot in line to purchase an ice cream cone for the discount price of only 99¢.
3. Once you have successfully stumbled upon the ground floor you must once again navigate through the self-serve furniture pickup to find out that the matching desk chair is out of stock and the bed frame that so perfectly matched your wardrobe is followed by a 2 hour line waiting for items in the back room that employees must retrieve for you. (Wait a minute, I thought the grand money-making idea was to cut back on employees by making customers get all of their own furniture?)
4. You have finally stacked your good deals that you worked very hard for into your yuppie VW Jetta parked a mile away, enjoyed some stop-n-go traffic, and arrived back at your furniture-lacking pad. The next task is to open the box, only to reveal 200 little pieces and a set of directions with no words. Better yet, blob people to show you what to do! Four hours later you find yourself angrily pounding cheap nails that bend at the first strike into your new balsa wood drawer set. Forget it, even with the free small replacement parts they offer, at this point, returning to the store for any reason is out of the question.
5. Your furniture is finally ready for use! And you can be confident that it will only last you the two years until the design goes out of style anyways. At this point your balsa dresser will be missing 3 knobs and the side will have fallen off. Now you must venture back to the furniture giant to find the latest and greatest. Lather, rinse, repeat cycle as needed.

Yet, as many times as I will call the rich Swedes an anustova (meaning “a twisted knot of ass hair held together by shit” in Swedish), I shall return to their store for another round of frustrating shopping for one simple reason - I am a yuppie. This phenomena is best described by the character Jack in Fight Club, “Like so many others, I had become a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct.” And tomorrow I shall flip through my IKEA catalog and ask myself “what kind of dining set defines me as a person?”*


*We should all pause here and remember what happened to Jack. Don’t let this Karma Killer get to you. Change your khakis and try Target.

• See for yourself

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 15th, 2006 at 2:48 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.