WARNING: This post contains profanity, blah, blah, blah.

I guess it was about a year ago when IKEA finally got around to opening their store outside of Charlotte. Lots of attention, lots of coverage, lots of hype. The usual glowing reviews in all the local newspapers, and all the local TV stations sent reporters to cover The Event. You know… because the economy was collapsing around our ears, our legislators were busy perpetrating the biggest scam in history, and apparently there was nothing else to talk about. “Hey, there’s a new place to spend your money! Because Charlotte doesn’t have enough places already!”

The result of all the hype was that going to the IKEA store became some kind of an event in the minds of the local populace, you know what I mean? If it’s Monday morning and a co-worker asks you what you did over the weekend and you say “We went down to Bass Pro” then the follow-up question is “Did you get anything?” But if you say “We went down to IKEA” then they don’t ask if you bought anything. They ask “What did you think?”

See the subtle difference there? With the hype factor added into the mix, going somewhere like the IKEA store becomes less about the products and more about the store. The experience of shopping there.

So what did I think? I’ll tell you what I thought. I liked the products. I despised the store. I was left with a new admiration for Swedish design, and a new desire to nuke the entire nation of Sweden until it’s nothing but a solid, unbroken slab of tastefully tinted glass.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice. It is, in fact, very nice. It’s relentlessly nice, maybe. It’s sleek, and clever, and hip, and nice – and you will experience and appreciate every fucking inch of all that niceness whether you like it or not.

Here’s how it works.

You walk in the big tasteful glass doors into a big tasteful glass atrium. There are two employees there waiting for you, and these two people will bestow upon you The Map. They’re very happy, young, carefully groomed, extremely hip people. Their mission in life is to give you The Map. Nothing will make them happier than presenting you with The Map. If you don’t take The Map, they will be disappointed and you will feel like a shithead.

I didn’t want a goddamned map, but then I felt like a shithead so I took one anyway.

See, if I had gone there to buy something specific, I would have wanted a map. Like, if I had been there to buy a sleek, clever, and hip table lamp, for example, I would have wanted a map so I could see where in this monstrous edifice the lamps are located. Then I could have made my way to that part of the store, secured a lamp, and made my way to the checkout counters. Clean, in-and-out, surgical strike shopping. No collateral damage. That’s my usual style for crap I can’t just buy online, and a map would be handy for that. Unfortunately, I wasn’t there for a lamp, or anything else in particular. I was there because my wife wanted to be there, and… well – that’s reason enough, apparently.

But anyway, it turns out that my primitive concept of a map as a tool to improve shopping efficiency is highly outdated in IKEA’s worldview. I might as well have rode in on a covered wagon with my quaint, obsolete notions. To the Swedes, it’s not a map. It’s The Map, and the function of the The Map is to make absolutely certain that you don’t make it out of the store until you’ve seen everything. Everything.

So you accept The Map, and the employees practically have an orgasm over the whole thing, and then you walk past the kid’s play area. Like everything else, it’s relentlessly cool and hip and everything. Also like everything else, it’s huge. Every surface is coated with at least 6 inches of foam, so that no matter how hard your children may try, they will be completely unable to injure themselves. There are also certified childcare experts on staff. IKEA is very, very eager to tell you about this. There might as well be a big sign over the whole deal that says HERE IS THE PLACE WHERE YOUR CHILDREN WILL PLAY. The subtext of course, being that the presence of non-cool, non-sleek, non-hip children would only distract you and your fellow shoppers from gaining a full appreciation for the sheer Swedish awesomeness you’re about to witness. You’d have to be a real shithead to put everybody through that, wouldn’t you?

It is at this point that one ascends a set of stairs and gains entrance to the labyrinth.

I don’t mean it’s a labyrinth in the sense that it’s confusing or disorienting. I mean a labyrinth in the sense that there’s only one way to get through it. Fortunately, The Way is clearly labeled. There are signs overhead, arrows, stripes on the floor, color coded symbols, pretty much everything but cattle chutes to make certain the herd sticks to The Way.

I know what you’re thinking. You’ve looked at The Map. You’ve seen the shortcuts. You’re thinking “Couldn’t you just take some of these shortcuts to cut through it?” Yes, in theory, you probably could. But those shortcuts so clearly labeled on The Map are hidden alleys, dark paths of shame. Simply thinking about taking a shortcut would indicate some sort of profound character flaw. It would demonstrate, in the clearest possible manner, that you lack the commitment necessary to fully appreciate the Swedish shopping experience. Trust me, you’d have to be a real shithead to take one of those shortcuts.

So you follow the arrows, you look at The Map, you adhere to The Way, you move with the herd, and you shop.

Believe it or not, there are people who like shopping at IKEA. I know, you’re skeptical, but I’ve talked to some of these people so I know it to be true. One of the things they always rave about is the selection. “There’s so much to choose from. You can find anything!” They are deeply, fundamentally wrong about that.

Let me explain it this way. Let’s say you walk into Target to purchase a lamp. You go back to where they keep the lamps, and there are like 25 different varieties of lamp, but there’s only 2 or 3 of each type, right? If you buy one of these lamps, a signal gets sent to the Target warehouse, they load one of the lamps you bought onto the truck, and that night or the next day some stockboy replaces the lamp you purchased so once again there are 3 lamps sitting there.

IKEA doesn’t believe in all these outdated ‘warehouse’ notions. When you shop at IKEA, you’re shopping in the warehouse. If they have 4000 identical copies of the same hip, sleek, cool, clever lamp, then you’re going to walk around a huge honkin’ stack of lamps. Wall to wall, floor to ceiling, stuff stacked on sleek, clever, tastefully designed stainless steel shelves. 25 stacks of 4000 lamps each, and it creates the illusion that there’s a lot to choose from, because you just wasted 10 minutes of your life just trudging through the fucking lamp department.

They’ve got an entire restaurant in the damned store, believe it or not – but even the restaurant confused me. They advertise it as featuring “Swedish cuisine”, which I had always thought of as food with too much fish and not enough vowels, but the only item on the menu that was clearly Swedish appeared to be the Swedish meatballs. Claiming your restaurant is Swedish because you have meatballs on the menu is kind of like saying you serve Italian cuisine because you can get marinara sauce on the cheese sticks. The menu was very heavy on hamburgers, and I guess it’s possible the IKEA people think hamburgers are Swedish, but that would be silly. Everybody knows the city of Hamburg is in Germany, and that Ray Kroc invented both McDonald’s and the cow in Illinois in 1954.

I guess it’s probably obvious by this point that I found the entire experience pretty goddamned miserable. Yeah, some of the products are cool. You find yourself saying “Oh, that’s clever” over and over again, but even cleverness wears on you after awhile. It’s like water torture, I guess. The first drop isn’t bad at all. Hour after hour after hour of it and you become a screaming maniac. Over and over again, mile upon mile, hour after hour slogging your way through this ultra-cool, ultra-tasteful, ultra-hip, ultra-huge warehouse. HERE IS ANOTHER COOL AND CLEVER THING it all says, and you find yourself thinking “Take your cool thing and shove it up your ass.”

So what can we conclude about the Swedish character after a visit to an IKEA store? I don’t know. The only thing I really know about Sweden is that IKEA is a pretty big deal, and that they build very, very safe (albeit somewhat dull) automobiles. I have to admit, the combination really puzzles me. If all Swedish shopping is as miserable as going to an IKEA store, I would think dying in a fiery car crash would be a welcome escape for the poor bastards.

- Ken