doodledee

Hoping to beat the crowds, Libby and I threw the kid in the car and headed down for our inaugural visit to the big new Ikea store early on Sunday morning. Not everyone knows this, but "Ikea" is actually Swedish for "huge ass blue building that fills you with rage and kinda makes you want to reorganize your closets". Seriously, look it up.

Well beat the crowds we did not. The place was *so* busy. Like state-fair-on-a-bad-day busy only way, way worse. Normally I can survive - sometimes even thrive - in large crowds. Well not at Ikea. You have no freedom of direction. You're herded along this nightmare of a path, forced to shuffle through EVERY EFFING DEPARTMENT ON BOTH LEVELS BEFORE YOU CAN LEAVE. You see it all, whether you want to or not. You also see about a million frustrated customers, including on that day, several in tears. Hey Dante, you thinking about adding a 10th level of hell? How about one where you're forced to navigate a double long stroller through an endless Ikea store? Noooooo!

I'm too lazy to google, but if nobody in the user experience community has documented a trip to a busy Ikea, they should. (Assuming they can drag themselves away from their Powerbooks for that long, that is.) Ikea has obviously crafted the environment very carefully, so I'd imagine a rigorous reverse engineering might reveal some neat theories as to why they did what they did.

The big consolation is that the stuff Ikea sells all seemed reasonably nice and all seemed reasonably cheap. It also plays well with our smaller house. A lot of it disagrees with me stylistically, but in reality that's probably a good thing.

I will never go back on a weekend, but I'll go back sometime. In 2008 or so. On a Tuesday morning.

IKEAnnot wait to get out of here!! - Huna went last weekend, too [musicola]