20-02-2002 21:58									#1
	Back at Ikea again... Avatar Enlargement: We've got the solution

If there's one thing that's guaranteed to drive me to a little psychotic episode, it's going to Ikea. This was my third visit, and I was really tempted to rampage screaming through the store, randomly hacking at other shoppers with broken crockery from the "Bäng" range of colourful and inexpensive mugs.

Who plans these things? What sick, twisted **** decided to have the store layout designed by Daedalus just after he’d really perfected the labyrinth? I know they build those stores big, but surely it’s got to defy several laws of physics to have a 5-mile walk to get across a 50-foot room? It’s impossible to just pop in to pick up a chair- you’re forced to trudge for miles around “Smeg” kitchenware, “Fümbl” beds and extensive racks of glass storage vessels from the “Bøttl” range, just to pick up your sodding “Juusy” table.

I was picking up furniture that weighed over 60kg, and I’m not a Yak or a small Himalayan woman. No way am I carrying that weight around a big store. Unfortunately all the heavy-duty trolleys were in the hands of gormless old gits who were using them to transport a pack of “Spøøn” wooden cutlery and a lampshade by “Gøbshïte”. There were loads of trolleys in sight- but all safely barricaded behind barriers in the “staff only” section to keep the grubby little mitts of the proles off them. All those warning signs sternly reminding people not to lift over 30kg fall a bit flat when the staff would rather watch your spine snap than cease their bollock-juggling and actually do something helpful.

Final straw? Having to lift the pushchair over concrete bollards designed to stop people taking precious, precious trolleys into the car park, and presumably make life more varied and challenging for anyone saddled with a wheelchair or Zimmer frame. What is it about the Swedish mindset that causes things like this to be created? Minds addled by Abba, porn and Bergman films?

Bastards. The furniture’s rubbish too.

Last edited by Lazarus and the Gimp on 20-02-2002 at 22:49

	20-02-2002 21:59									#2
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Using text not recognised by IE is just another addition to their long list of cultural war crimes.

	20-02-2002 22:23									#3
	Lose 30 kilos (of popups)

I would have sympathy but you decided to go to Ikea so you deserve it.

Is Ikea Finnish by any chance?

	20-02-2002 22:32									#4
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My wife goes there all the time. One trip was all I needed to know in order to refuse any future pleas from my wife to accompany her. I've never seen a more sadistic layout.
Most of the furniture sucks, but there actually are a couple of good items. BUT GOOD LUCK FINDING THEM.


One Simpson's episode did a good satire on IKEA.

RAH

	20-02-2002 22:38									#5
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization: The Boardgame

I like bazzaaaars. Much more interesting. You can't end up with a kitchen table adorned with oriental wood dragons on the side at Ikea.

	20-02-2002 22:41									#6
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We have done the Ikea drill too.

Time for some marital politics as in
"Honey, I will stay out here in the car and watch the kids
[thought bubble]and listen to the basketball game on the radio[/thought bubble]
while you go inside. That way you can concentrate on shopping without being distracted."

My end of the deal is no walk in the park if the kids wake up from their nap, but it sure beats the alternative.

	20-02-2002 22:44									#7
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quote: What is it about the Swedish mindset that causes things like this to be created?

An urge for cheap, practically packed furniture that doesn't require you to rent a lorry to bring home?

	20-02-2002 22:47									#8
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Not the furniture but the layout.

If that's the nural pathway of some unfortunate sod he'd be a total nut.

	20-02-2002 22:51									#9
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Ah yes. Here's the account of my last visit.

"Ikea- Sweden's Revenge.

Step 1.

First you must take a vast expanse of inner-city land, preferably an area already used to provide unique and slightly off-the-wall public entertainment, such as a League football ground, or a dog track. This land must be bought up and then bulldozed flat to be replaced by car-parks, ensuring that another irreplaceable piece of urban leisure is destroyed and thereby contributing to the slow death of the inner cities and the creation of a car-less underclass.

Ideally this area should be situated right next to a major inner-city motorway junction. This will achieve the "double whammy" of ensuring that the site is seen by the maximum possible number of motorists, whilst also helping to achieve gridlock and locking up the local road network.
Now build a huge, vast, ****ing colossal warehouse on the site. Make it big. Make it ugly. Make it really, really ugly. Then, just in case anyone might still feel it still has some infinitesimal trace of aesthetic appeal left, paint it all bright blue.

Step 2.

Fill the warehouse with crap. Make some of the crap dirt-cheap pre-assembled furniture that will stun the cretinous and gullible with it's sheer affordability. This low price is achieved through having these items assembled out of balsa wood and stuck together with bogies by the under-12 inmates of special learning establishments for "God's Special Children with Challenges".

Make other items of crap horrifically tasteless, taste-raping monstrosities with arcane Scandinavian names, like "Cumgjargler". Ideally, paint them all in vile shades of puce or "Rancid pus yellow". The remainder of the warehouse can be filled with flat cardboard boxes containing slabs of chipboard thrown together at random by 2 acid casualties and an anti-social bastard.

Make customer pathways through the warehouse that leave it impossible to make any trip into the store without making a 4-mile round trip through ever single area. Then crowd these pathways with "Care in the Community" patients stupefied with barbiturates and armed with trollies. If at any point the paths miraculously clear, use cattle prods to herd vast throngs of young children, their faces a raging torrent of glutinous strands of snot, across the pathways to bounce excitably on the furniture.

At the checkouts a special ambience is required. Therefore the entire area has been designed in homage to the queue for the soup kitchens in Belsen. Traumatised shoppers can then happily while away hours clinging to their packages of assorted crap, tat, garbage and trash in the gloom, whilst reading the signs declaring "Achtung! Don't lift anything over 50KG, you worthless scum!"

Step 3.

Take your "Cjocksukkr" flat-packed "patinised pine" dresser out of the store. Naturally this involves a four-hour wait in a howling gale for your other half to queue for a parking space in the pick-up area, unless you fancy carrying half a tonne of Sitka Pine a mile or so to where the carparks are so thoughtfully sited on the other side of the warehouse.

Next, attempt to assemble the ****er. Read the instructions promising that the item can be casually thrown together with just a Phillips Screwdriver and a hammer. Decide that the author of the instructions was probably brain-damaged and take the more realistic allocation of a stanley knife, a hacksaw, a large roll of gaffer tape, a torque wrench, a crowbar and several friends.

Put it together. Naturally, several vital screws of arcane design will be missing, so improvise with bent nails. Before starting, save yourself a few hours of heartache by letting the dog eat the instructions. They were only included in the pack to mess with you mind.

Assemble the dresser. The dowellings that are meant to fix it together may need gentle coaxing into their holes- I recommend a 16 lb sledgehammer and some vaseline for this job. Open completion of the task, admire your handiwork for a few moments before dismantling it to put several pieces back the right way up. Of course, at least one piece of wood in a prominently visible place will be split, splintered, or just plain missing. Improvise with putty.

Congratulations on purchasing your IKEA dresser. Now dry your tears, staunch the bleeding and contact a good lawyer."

	20-02-2002 22:55									#10
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Hilarious thread! Ikea is Sweden's gift to the world. Almost every Western country had its own Ikea but not Finland, until a couple of years ago. And now it is a huge success here too.

Humans are really one species: all you say about your own feelings apply here too, to Finnish men. And what you say about your wives applies to Finnish women. I always enjoy Ikea!

	20-02-2002 23:03									#11
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Gee Bugs... I couldn't have said it any better

Thank God my wife is trained now. She plans her trips to Ikea during major sporting events. She knows I won't go, and she can spend whatever she wants... Yeah, trained

	20-02-2002 23:06									#12
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Ive been to Ikea a couple of times and all I can say is DONT EAT THE MEATBALLS!!

They taste fine, but it doesnt take long for them to force their way through you if you know what I mean...

	20-02-2002 23:19									#13
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Like America has its war against terrorism, Laz has his war against Scandinavia...

	20-02-2002 23:24									#14
	an axis of evil, no doubt Full PM-box? Change here!

Should we expect a salvo directed at the Norwegians?

Are the Danes likely targets for a verbal bombing?

	20-02-2002 23:51									#15
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I know exactly the thing Laz, pain in the arse isn't it!

quote: Originally posted by Caligastia Ive been to Ikea a couple of times and all I can say is DONT EAT THE MEATBALLS!! They taste fine, but it doesnt take long for them to force their way through you if you know what I mean...

I've been there, although they didn't have too bad an effect on me, just that I was very smelly for the duration of the evening

And be warned; expect hordes of Swedes to descend on this thread any time now

	20-02-2002 23:57									#16
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No problem with the Ikea outlets here. They are arranged wntirely rationally. You can quickely find what you want, buy it, and get out the door. The devious Swedes know better than to screw with Texians.

	21-02-2002 00:05									#17
	Tired of ads?

I recently had my first IKEA experience. I needed a couple of cheap, simple wardrobes for my new apartment. Not caring for cheap, hideous Chinese furniture I visited the Shanghai IKEA.

While I was happy to find exactly what I was looking for within my budgetary reach, I was frustrated by repeatedly loosing my way on the same floor, and my inability to determine just how to exit the place.

Now at least I know it wasn't just me! Thanks, BFB!

- mindseye

	21-02-2002 01:01									#18
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Well, I don't know 'bout foreign IKEA:s but my local one are well-organized and the stuff you buy is so easy to put together a 9-year-old could do it.

Regarding the design, it's not state of the art, but nor is it hideously ugly.

Regarding the names, it's kitch, goddamnit!

Maybe the problems Bugs has relies within himself?

	21-02-2002 01:07									#19
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What's Ikea? I don't think I've ever heard of them before this thread.

	21-02-2002 01:08									#20
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Kitsch is the realm solely inhabited by those lacking the ability or courage to be funny, offensive and/or gay- and calling a range of mugs "Bang" is just unforgiveable. It's off the scale.

	21-02-2002 01:17									#21
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IKEA rules! OK, some of he furniture suck ass, but most of it IS really good. It´s christmas morning in my house when the new IKEA-catalouge arrives

And it´s a experience in itself to go to IKEA, almost a ritual actually. We make the trip two or three times a year dressed in our ceremonial IKEA-fur robes and horned helmets. When we reach the sacred parking lot we sacrifice a moose to the IKEA-god (Ingvar Kamprad) while chanting IKEA in a variety of voices. Then we finally enter the holy temple that is IKEA.

Well inside we show our reverence unto our god by buying useless trinkets and cheap mugs and glasses. And yay, even some over-designed lamps, and bedclothes that you can wash one time before they get all turned and twisted.

The food served in the cafeteria is a penance for our sins, but we bear it with happy hearts for we know that in the great IKEA in the sky there will be roast boar and mead to drink.

We then go home feeling content, for we have indeed shown reverence unto our god.

	21-02-2002 01:26									#22
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Positively brilliant.

quote: Well, I don't know 'bout foreign IKEA:s but my local one are well-organized and the stuff you buy is so easy to put together a 9-year-old could do it

Scandinavian countries have the highest suicide rate in the world. I used to think it was the weather. Now I realise that where the British are proud of their colonies, the Americans are proud of their dollar, the French are proud of their armpit hair and the Germans are proud of their minority-rights history, all that Sweden has to be proud of is their ability to export their culture in the form of crappy furniture and funny accents.

	21-02-2002 01:30									#23
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Kitch is the realm solely inhabited by those lacking the ability to be gay? LOL!

Allow me to give the correct definition: Kitsch is an abstract phenomena transmitted on a frequency far above the limited perception of the average troglodyte and only recepted by trend-sensitive, intelligent people.

	21-02-2002 01:35									#24
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Don't be so ****ing serious. Oh, sorry you are Swedish aren't you. Sorry I don't normally mock the afflicted.

	21-02-2002 01:45									#25
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quote: [QUOTE] Originally posted by KrazyHorse

quote: Originally posted by KrazyHorse Scandinavian countries have the highest suicide rate in the world. I used to think it was the weather. Now I realise that where the British are proud of their colonies, the Americans are proud of their dollar, the French are proud of their armpit hair and the Germans are proud of their minority-rights history, all that Sweden has to be proud of is their ability to export their culture in the form of crappy furniture and funny accents.

Pah, Stockholm is the trendiest city in the world. That's all that matters for me.

You ARE aware of Americas is ca. 10 years behind in fashion, right? LOL!

	21-02-2002 01:51									#26
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quote: Originally posted by Juggernaut Kitch is the realm solely inhabited by those lacking the ability to be gay? LOL! Allow me to give the correct definition: Kitsch is an abstract phenomena transmitted on a frequency far above the limited perception of the average troglodyte and only recepted by trend-sensitive, intelligent people.

So kitch is for those people who desperately want to be camp, but just don't have the sense of style?

	21-02-2002 01:52									#27
	Jugenheaden Support Apolyton, buy Galactic Civilizations: Deluxe Edition

IKEA's whole eco-friendly organic-formed modular dynamic is soooo 1993.

	21-02-2002 02:13									#28
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quote: Originally posted by Juggernaut You ARE aware of Americas is ca. 10 years behind in fashion, right? LOL!

So says the guy with a mid-'90s Seinfeld quote in his sig ...

	21-02-2002 02:18									#29
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Their higher end office furniture rocks, but a lot of their stuff is crap, too - you're getting what you pay for. The one out here isn't that painful to navigate, and has shortcuts that let you get from point a to point b without circumnavigating the entire shopping mall.

	21-02-2002 02:21									#30
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quote: Originally posted by Juggernaut Allow me to give the correct definition: Kitsch is an abstract phenomena transmitted on a frequency far above the limited perception of the average troglodyte and only recepted by trend-sensitive, intelligent people.

'round these parts, we calls that "horseshit"