I was glad when they said unto me, "Let us go unto Milton Keynes",
And now here we are in thy aisles, oh Ikea.
The Lord is my shopkeeper.
I shall Lack Kvarnvik.
Oh Lord, how many are my Forså
How Mandel rise up against me.
All day long they call unto me
saying "Where is now the exit?"
For thy corridors are eternal
The floors of this building go on forever.
Balding men are crying out, "free us from this chain -
from the hordes of strangely-named furniture deliver us.
"For we remember how we left the babes and sucklings in the ball pit
Thinking we would be back in a short time, and have a cup of coffee
"And yet now we walk through the valley of the shadow of Jeff
and I'm feeling a bit ill."
Surely Iris and Laundry will be with me all the days of my life
And I shall be stuck in this enormous shop forever.
Ah Ikea.
ReplyDeleteAs someone born without a sense of direction, the Ikea shopping experience is akin to torture, especially when I need the toilet.
It’s like following the yellow brick road without the expectation of meeting the wizard at the end.
You can enter Ikea one day, and leave days later, as the shop design is undoubtedly based on the casino principle, whereby, you’re denied any sensory contact with the outside world, so you have no audiovisual time cues.
You go in with the certain plan to spend £50, and by the time you arrive at the checkout – as if by witchcraft – you find yourself with £300 worth of products in the trolley.
And God forbid you should flirt with death and find yourself walking against the flow.
Perhaps we should design church buildings according to this model?
Ha! Brilliant :)
ReplyDeleteThere is now a world wide web of these things. We went to one in Washington, just outside DC, and could swear we were in the same place as the last one we went to in Warrington. Friends of ours left in England the furniture they bought at Lakeside, moved to China, and bought all the same things at the Beijing store. My theory is that there is just one huge Ikea store the size of the world with portals scattered around even in MK.
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