Visiting Ikea is one of life’s inevitabilities. There’s an Ikea on every inhabited continent, 487 across 63 countries. But Ikea is more than a furniture retailer. Ikea is an idea, an abstraction, a way of life. No other shop has captured the hearts and minds of the public in quite the same way, at least not in the UK. Argos is a fate worse than purgatory; Woolworths has gone to the great retailer in the sky; John Lewis is for the Chelsea tractor drivers among us; WH Smith is only bearable when you’re at an airport, and their drinks taste like they’ve been stored in lukewarm bathwater; and Curry’s is selling AI fridges (I don’t want an AI fridge, thank you – I’ve seen 2001: A Space Odyssey; I know how this ends.)
Ikea is there for us at every major turning point in our lives. It is life’s central station: we will all pass through its front doors at some point. There’s the recently divorced dad with a crippling hangover buying a plastic pot plant because his much-too-young girlfriend said his new flat looks like a sanatorium. There’s the couple filming a TikTok and getting handsy by the bathroom display. There’s the single mother buying her son another bed because he’s growing faster than a genetically modified cornfield. There’s the first-time buyer (unlikely in this economy) panic-buying for their empty new home. There’s the clueless, spotty 18-year-old on their way to university, their parents dragging a trolley of miscellaneous junk that will never see the light of day. There’s the strange bloke who only goes to Ikea for the food; he’s on his seventeenth serving of meatballs, and he’s got the meat sweats.
There is a shared idiosyncratic ritual to visiting Ikea, a ritual that we have grown to love. Just last month, my girlfriend insisted that we go to Ikea on a ‘date’. What she really meant was: ‘Our flat looks like a tip, and we can’t keep using the footstool as a dining table. You’re developing a hunch.’
So we did what every person going to Ikea does: we visited a horrible part of the country. In this instance, it was the ironically named Millennium Leisure Park in Greenwich. The Millennium Leisure Park was built at a time when Britain looked towards the future with hope. Now it is the sort of place where one can find a stabbing, an erstwhile Pizza Hut – the shadow of its former sign etched into the building’s stone like the after-effects of an atomic blast – and a bowling alley all on the same street. But none of that matters once you enter Ikea.
The first part of an Ikea trip starts with the hot dog man selling the Ikea-brand hot dogs for £1.40 a pop. This is your last chance to fuel up before you enter the maze. The food hall is at the other end of the labyrinth, and it could be hours, possibly days, before you find it. Like Orpheus in his descent to the Underworld, there is no looking back once you’re in Ikea – you must look forward at all times and pray that the exit is nigh.
The best part about visiting Ikea is not the furniture itself; it is the showrooms: the tiny boxes made to look like real homes. I like to play a fun little game called Who Lives Here? There is always one room that looks like a taxidermist-cum-serial killer occupies it: black toilet, black mirror, black knives, black lamp, plush teddy, black bookshelf, black plates, black sink, black carpet so you can’t see the bloodstains. Couples walk through these showrooms like voyeurs from a sad Raymond Carver story about impotence and alcoholism: ‘Look, darling, that’s where she keeps her medicine. And over here is where the little boy who drowned used to paint. Let’s sit on their bed and stare at the ceiling whilst the radio plays static.’
This is all part of the Ikea experience, as is stumbling across the overwhelming soft toys room and getting lost in the eyes of a human-sized teddy bear called DJUNGELSKOG. You may not have intended to buy a DJUNGELSKOG – you may not even want a DJUNGELSKOG – but leaving with a DJUNGELSKOG is a necessary part of the ritual. It doesn’t matter that he costs £27; you will have him.
There is a shared idiosyncratic ritual to visiting Ikea, a ritual that we have grown to love
An Ikea trip ends with the Tannoy system announcing that the store is closing in 20 minutes. This is usually followed by the stark realisation that you’ve been standing in the towels and pillows room for seven hours. What comes next is the gauntlet run to the checkout aisle and the inevitable three-day period of building all the furniture that you bought.
But we love it. And we have Ingvar Kamprad to thank for this ritual. In 1943, a then 17-year-old Kamprad founded Ikea from his uncle Ernst’s kitchen table. (When I was 17, I smoked a whole packet of Silk Cut cigarettes in one go and threw up outside my mother’s flat – but success isn’t linear.) I like to imagine the adolescent Kamprad as a neurotic Frankenstein-esque figure, hunched over the table in Älmhult and laughing maniacally: ‘But don’t you see, Uncle? They build it themselves! That’s the beauty of it! We don’t do a damn thing! We just stick it in a box, press a button and let the chaos happen at home!’
Where would we be without Kamprad? I’ll tell you: we’d be in a mess. A few months ago, I was unfaithful to Ikea. I ordered a sofa from a third party on Amazon. What arrived was not a sofa; what arrived was something designed with the Borrowers in mind. I spent five hours scratching my head before I realised the piece of junk was a lost cause. In the end, I threw the whole thing away.
I’m not suggesting that Ikea sells the best furniture – some of it is really rather lame. But I am suggesting that Ikea deserves its special place in our hearts. While so many other global retailers fall into obscurity, Ikea has held on to its reputation. Why? Because it’s never tried to be something that it’s not. It’s neither upmarket nor downmarket, great quality nor terrible quality. Ikea is just Ikea, dry meatballs and all. So next time you shudder at the thought of a trip to the Swedish multinational furniture conglomerate, just remember: it could be worse… you could be going to Argos.
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