I Am Curious (Yellow AND Blue)
IKEA opened in the Twin Cities last July, and until this week I'd had no need to visit. But I was in the market for a coffee table so I figured I'd check it out. The store is a blue mammoth next to the Mall of America, and on a Wednesday night it wasn't very crowded - apparently the post-holiday buying doldrums were still in effect.
Visiting IKEA is not a ten-minute proposition; you can't just stroll in, pick up what you want, and leave. The "aisle" as such is a serpentine path that wends you through the entire store, guiding you past fully furnished rooms that offer decorating suggestions and reinforce the IKEA design philosophy: usually simple and clean, but sometimes seemingly from the 1950s - George Jetson futuristic and/or Jack Kerouac groovy.
Arrows on the floor and directing signs overhead keep you moving. After a while you start feeling like a queued-up tourist at Disneyland or a Holstein shuffling down the stockyards chute to oblivion. The store layout is calculated to keep you there and shopping for a long time; the IKEA cafe is on hand to serve breakfast (only 99 cents!), lunch, and dinner lest your blood sugar drop somewhere between Home Organization and Kitchen Accessories.
IKEA products have interesting names, sometimes pseudo-Swedish: ACKTION, TÅGELBO, FÄLTVÄDD. Sometimes just curious choices: DATA (silverware), BILLY (bookcases), NERO (drawer organizer). But 99% of their stuff isn't made anywhere near Sweden at all, but mostly places like Vietnam, Poland, and China. There's a wealth of items priced under $5, so many so that it's very tempting to fill up your cart with $1.99 CD racks and 99 cent wastebaskets and $2.99 throw rugs as you negotiate the labyrinth.
Finally reached the living room section. Nothing they had totally matched what I was looking for (most of them were either too big or too... weird - that Scandinavian design, yanno) so I ended up getting two simple end tables instead - positioned side by side they're just the right size. Also picked up some coasters, a wastebasket (only 99 cents!) and some knives. My total tab: $38 - less than I usually drop at Target.
At checkout, the woman in front of me had one of those flatbed carts with about 5 large boxes on it, an IKEA "big yellow bag" that was half full, and a sheet of paper with a list of stuff that I guess she was picking up at a loading dock. Her total: $3,030.90 (!!!). Of course she then tried to pay for it with an out of town check and had trouble finding the right ID.
I always pick the wrong line.
Visiting IKEA is not a ten-minute proposition; you can't just stroll in, pick up what you want, and leave. The "aisle" as such is a serpentine path that wends you through the entire store, guiding you past fully furnished rooms that offer decorating suggestions and reinforce the IKEA design philosophy: usually simple and clean, but sometimes seemingly from the 1950s - George Jetson futuristic and/or Jack Kerouac groovy.
Arrows on the floor and directing signs overhead keep you moving. After a while you start feeling like a queued-up tourist at Disneyland or a Holstein shuffling down the stockyards chute to oblivion. The store layout is calculated to keep you there and shopping for a long time; the IKEA cafe is on hand to serve breakfast (only 99 cents!), lunch, and dinner lest your blood sugar drop somewhere between Home Organization and Kitchen Accessories.
IKEA products have interesting names, sometimes pseudo-Swedish: ACKTION, TÅGELBO, FÄLTVÄDD. Sometimes just curious choices: DATA (silverware), BILLY (bookcases), NERO (drawer organizer). But 99% of their stuff isn't made anywhere near Sweden at all, but mostly places like Vietnam, Poland, and China. There's a wealth of items priced under $5, so many so that it's very tempting to fill up your cart with $1.99 CD racks and 99 cent wastebaskets and $2.99 throw rugs as you negotiate the labyrinth.
Finally reached the living room section. Nothing they had totally matched what I was looking for (most of them were either too big or too... weird - that Scandinavian design, yanno) so I ended up getting two simple end tables instead - positioned side by side they're just the right size. Also picked up some coasters, a wastebasket (only 99 cents!) and some knives. My total tab: $38 - less than I usually drop at Target.
At checkout, the woman in front of me had one of those flatbed carts with about 5 large boxes on it, an IKEA "big yellow bag" that was half full, and a sheet of paper with a list of stuff that I guess she was picking up at a loading dock. Her total: $3,030.90 (!!!). Of course she then tried to pay for it with an out of town check and had trouble finding the right ID.
I always pick the wrong line.
posted by Addison Clark at 9:27 AM
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