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2002-01-04 | 1:38 p.m.

I hadn't been to Ikea in over a year---and I'd only been once before---but yesterday I went there on a fool's errand with my mother and all three kids. I was reminded, forcefully, of my original impression that shopping at Ikea is a masochistic exercise.

On the way out of the elevator in the new parking structure Ikea had to build this year to accommodate the faithful, I overheard a fashionable British man snap at his female companion, "Six hours wasted to look at a piece of crap!" The woman hung her head and said nothing. I chuckled darkly, as they say in the pirate stories. Ikea is no place for a straight man. Duff did go with me the one time and did remarkably well, but I think it was the spirit of raw adventure that propelled him through, not shopping instinct. I wouldn't think of asking him to go again unless it was for a large purchase I had staked out in advance and for which I could provide geographic coordinates. If I even say the word 'Costco' in his vicinity he starts to bleat like a goat.

The reason we were at Ikea was because I bought two sets of curtains there last year and one curtain rod, forgetting that I have three windows in my bedroom. Or maybe I had some other plan in mind, thought I needed to measure or something. In the end, I hung one curtain on the one rod and have suffered ever since with one pretty window and the other two smothered in the hideous colonial-blue mini-blinds that were there when we moved in. (Remember that my bedroom is painted lime green and the ceiling is lemon yellow.) So finally, finally, finally I drive the 30 miles to Ikea hoping to discover the same Gertrude (or Gjertrud or whatever the fuck they call it) curtains but of course, they don't have them. They have all new stuff. I somehow convinced myself that since all the other crap in their catalog stayed the same, so would the linens. But of course not---they change the linens often to make all the old crap seem fresh, just like they advise us to do.

So I get ALL creative and try to improvise. I pick out another curtain from the display, Wanda, that's a dark red-pink I'm hoping will compliment the Gertrude I already have at home. Since the two remaining windows are side by side, I'm thinking I can hang Wanda on the outside, Gertrude on the inside, and all on one rod. But then when I look around for Wanda, it becomes clear that she caught the last bus to yuppie heaven and here I am at Ikea for no good reason. I should have left then, but I still needed another rod to match the one I already bought, so I find the rod in the right shade of beechwood but there are no brackets to match, so I have to buy pine brackets and hope that I will get around to staining the pine brackets to match the beech rod. All of which seems like the height of stupid. And of course, there is no one you can consult on any of these matters, such as whether Wanda is merely crying her eyes out in some storage closet and will be back on the shelves an hour after you leave this hellhole. When it comes to customer service, Ikea makes Target seem like I. Magnin circa 1970.

And while I'm standing in line, the line that takes the entire lifetime of a rodent to get through, eyeing a pair of college girls with loaded carts and bad haircuts, it occurs to me that while I might be the right demographic for Ikea, it is not the right demographic for me. I am not broke enough to shop at Ikea. There is nothing there I cannot live without. And unless they reinvent themselves as an online presence, I expect I will live without their Swedish brand of sadism for a very long time. Perhaps forever.

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