REAPING THE ANTI-HUMAN HARVEST:

Ikea - Everyone's Favourite Swedish Export (John Bingham, 2/10/05, The Scotsman)

Furniture giant Ikea boasts in its corporate vision statement that it has set out to side with “the many” and not the few – but for one London store early this morning that proved to be too many.

The group’s latest mega-outlet in Edmonton, north London, was forced to close just half an hour after its midnight opening when an estimated 6,000 bargain-hunters flocked to the store. [...]

The company, founded more than 60 years ago in a village in southern Sweden by Ingvar Kamprad, then just 17 years old, now has stores in 29 countries across the world.

Known for its flat-pack bookshelves and cheap sofas, designer furniture at low prices have helped make Ikea as popular a Swedish export as Sven Goran Eriksson.

But the company’s vision extends far beyond the queues of shoppers, trolleys laden with everything from flatpack wardrobes to pepper grinders.

Flatpack farrago: Ikea treats its customers so badly, a riot is the least it might have expected (Susie Steiner, February 10, 2005, Guardian Unlimited)

There has been much talk about consumer greed in the wake of the Ikea riot, about the depravity of people crushing one another for a £45 sofa. But there is less talk about Ikea's greed, and in particular about the way in which this giant of a corporation manipulates its customer's emotions, sending them into ever more hysterical cycles of rage and frustration.

The impervious face the company presents to its screaming, fitting, hyperventilating public is an interesting psychological phenomenon in itself. Ikea behaves rather like a cool lothario who seduces and woos but offers no emotional aftercare ... and then wonders why its lovers go off at the deep end.

This unbending approach is evident in all Ikea's rules of purchase. You can look on Ikea's website, but you cannot purchase anything on it. You cannot purchase over the telephone either. You cannot ring up and add to your existing order, you must visit the store again. If you go to an Ikea store by car, you must resign yourself to a couple of hours in a tailback. If you go to an Ikea store by public transport, you must resign yourself to being stung by the store's furniture delivery service.

When you're inside an Ikea store, you must come to terms with a near permanent state of bewilderment: shelves stacked with flat brown boxes labelled with random codes and names; a yellow road which takes you inexplicably through bedrooms when all you wanted was some kitchen handles. And then, then, when your emotional temperature is rising and you can feel a panicky hotness around your ears, you will be faced with Ikea's version of customer care - an underpaid teenager, trained in psychic disengagement who'll tell you they're out of stock. The next delivery won't be for two weeks. No, you can't place an order, you'll have to return to the store. That other query? You'll have to ask someone in bathrooms ... that's five yards down the yellow road and the queue's on your left.

They got off lightly with a riot, when you think about it.

NPR did a story on them a while ago, implicitly (or explicitly) comparing them favorably to Wal-Mart on the basis of their corporate culture. It sounded as inviting as the lower levels of Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 10, 2005 12:34 PM