What is there to say about Ikea that hasn’t already been said?
The cretinous children who scamper around you as you try to buy a fucking saucepan, putting their sticky fingers on everything when they’re not having a screaming tantrum or blowing their noses while mere feet away from you.
The inane muppets who insist on walking in front of you at a speed approximating a senile Aunt looking for a place to die.
The ridiculous queues at the checkouts inevitably caused by some tool who doesn’t want to pay $8.99 for a disgusting crocheted placemat when the sign clearly said $9.88.
I loathe the place. But, of course, I love it. I am like a beaten girlfriend when it comes to Ikea. No matter how many times I leave the store in a rage I always go back.
‘Never again,’ I say to myself, as I swear loudly about the ridiculousness of having priority car parks marked ‘family’ as though you need to have dropped something out of your uterus to park within shouting distance of the door.
Has anyone ever come out of Ikea happy? I mean, really? I went there yesterday on my day off, officially in search of a saucepan and a cutlery holder. I came out with a large wooden plate and a photo frame. Seriously. I don’t know what happened. I want into an Ikea coma as soon as I stepped into the homewares section.
Half the problem is that everything is so cheap. Too cheap. I could spent $8 on lunch without blinking so why shouldn’t I spend it on some natty colourful shoeboxes that I really feel would help me sort my life out, really get it all together? And, sure, all my previous attempts at creating harmony in my wardrobe have failed but surely this is merely because I have lacked the proper tools to really get things in order...
And I think that that, right there, is the reason why I, among others, keep going back. I hate what Ikea stands for just as I hate the experience of being there but I love the feeling of hope that fills me as I browse through throw cushions. Nowhere else quite caters to the consumer experience in the same way, offering me a little peak at what my life would be like if I could just have a special place to put my pashminas, a better system for storing my DVDs or more time to really get at the grout in the corner of the bathroom.
Of course I don’t have any of these things and probably never will. On the plus side I do have a pretty fetching wooden plate and a photo frame I don't really care for.
3 comments:
Ooh, Kate. You've hit a nerve here.
The last time I went to Ikea, I actually felt my patience and tolerance for the place gradually disappear with every step I went further in to the store. It's the children. It has to be the children.
Who in their right mind would EVER bring kids with them to a place like that?? Idiots.
My then-girlfriend and I waited in line for ten minutes without moving with an armful of shite that we did not need.
I then cracked the shits and said I wasn't doing it. We stormed out without buying anything and I haven't been back since. It was oh-so-satifying walking out of that place without giving them any money. Fuckers.
Yesterday I felt positively hostile by the time I got back to my car, which is ridiculous, and I actually resented having parted with any of my cold, hard cash. The children are bad enough but the people who bring them there, as though it’s some kind of a family day out, are worse. Dump the little shits in that giant room full of plastic balls and never go back, I say.
So true, all of it. Ikea is the worst place in the world.
You need a bottle of vodka to drum up the courage to go there.
However, given it's in such a god awful place as Osbourne Park where even the traffic is demented it's probably wisest just the keep vodka bottle for hitting morons with those stupid big-blue-bag-trolleys over the head with.
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