From Warrington to Shanghai, the world is obsessed with Ikea furniture, writes Shane Hegarty, and Irish buyers are clearly willing to sweat for their Fågelbo sofa beds.
It is an odyssey through home furnishings. It is a consumer's dream that induces a consumerist trance. There are no windows. No clocks. The arrows on the floor direct you through the vast store, and unless you know the cleverly disguised shortcuts, you can reach the exit only by passing through every department. Kitchens, bathrooms, sittingrooms, lights, gardens. Grazing on utensils and storage solutions as you go. Is that all new biscuit jars cost? We'd be stupid not to buy them.
Finally, you get to the end of the trail and to the warehouse to pick up your order. And you emerge into the daylight, a little heady. But you are happy.
Because you have a new sofa bed. It cost half of what you'd normally pay. It looks great. And its name is Fågelbo.
Ikea wants you to be happy. Its mission is to bring you inner peace through elegance, affordability and functionality. Across the globe, humanity buys into that to the tune of more than €13 billion a year. There are now 200 Ikea stores in 32 countries. Another probably opened while you were reading that sentence. Ten per cent of European babies are now conceived on Ikea beds. Several of them while you read that sentence.
Every year, 100 million catalogues are printed, each featuring 12,000 items in ranges named after Nordic geographical features. The company claims it is the second most widely read book after the Bible.
Only Africa remains as a continent unconverted to the merits of modernist design, sophisticated practicality and cheap clips that hang magazines in the bathroom. Meanwhile in Ireland, many feel as if we are also living in décor deprivation. So, no longer content to wait for Ikea to be allowed come to them, many of us are going to it. In Warrington or in Glasgow, Irish can be found wandering the aisles, mouths and wallets agape, on a pilgrimage to the home goods cathedrals.
Not all are happy. Thursday's Liveline was clogged with callers complaining that their orders hadn't arrived, some more than a month after buying them. They are learning something known in Britain for some time now. Despite its rigid customer service ethic - it does not have "customers", but "visitors" - Ikea is famously unreliable. Screws will be missing from your flatpack. The instructions will be indecipherable to anyone without a degree in advanced engineering. Ikea, goes the joke, is the Swedish word for "out of stock".
Such discontent must disturb its founder, Ingvar Kamprad.
If you want to understand his and Ikea's philosophy of Ikea, it's best to start with his 1976 tract The Testament of a Furniture Dealer. It begins: "We have decided once and for all to side with the many." The "many" is the ordinary person, without money to burn. The furniture "must reflect our way of thinking by being as simple and straightforward as we are ourselves".
KAMPRAD FLIRTED WITH Nazism in his youth, something he has since admitted is a major regret of his life. But, if he left that fundamental ideology in his youth, it could be argued that he took some of its rhetoric with him.
"Simplicity in our behaviour gives us strength," says the Testament. "Our duty to expand . . . Those who cannot or will not join us are to be pitied . . . What we want to do, we can do and will do, together. A glorious future!" A self-confessed heavy drinker, Kamprad now lives in semi-retirement, and as a semi-recluse, in Switzerland. It has been rumoured that he is worth over €50 billion, which would make him richer than Bill Gates.
He was born in 1926 in the southern Swedish town of Småland where he honed his entrepreneurial skills by selling matches from the back of his bicycle as a boy; then selling fish, Christmas tree decorations, seeds, pens and pencils. He founded Ikea at the age of 17, selling wallets, picture frames, table runners, watches, jewellery and nylon stockings. Kamprad used the local milk van to distribute his wares and operated out of a two square metre shed. That still stands today. Longer, some might joke, than much of the goods it sold.
He started to sell furniture in 1947, doing so exclusively from 1951, which was also the year the first catalogue was published. That catalogue became three-dimensional in 1953 with the opening of the first Ikea shop in Almhult, where it still has its design headquarters. The company started to design its own furniture when local dealers became so angered by undercutting of their prices that they encouraged suppliers to boycott it.
The flatpack revolution came about by accident, when an employee, trying to figure out how to get a chair into a car boot, took its legs off. It was the company's "Eureka!" moment. Here was a way in which items could be shipped easily, requiring less space, with less chance of them being damaged. It also meant the customer could take it away and, more importantly, put it together themselves.
One commentator recently suggested that the flatpack is not just a smart business device, but a moral lesson. Kamprad's personal ethic is one of hard work, self-improvement and minimal waste. His thriftiness is instilled within a company in which executives travel on budget airlines and stay in cheap hotels. And in self-assembly, that stretches to the public.
Sweat a little for your goods and you will not just be a happier person through good design, you will be a better person.
HAVING ARRIVED AT the moment when post-war homes were looking for affordable modernist furniture, it then began to drive that yearning for what has been described as a "frugal aesthetic". Ikea prospers on what it calls "democratic design" of good, attractive furniture, easily stored, shipped and assembled relatively cheaply.
And Kamprad's zeal is reciprocated. In Sydney 5,000 people queued recently for the opening of the largest home-furnishings store in the southern hemisphere, many of them camping overnight for the chance to get a $50 (€38) sofa. On the first day of a new Shanghai store, 80,000 people visited.
There are some who would be baffled by the hesitation of the Irish Government. In the US, Ikea has been described as a "retail rainmaker for dry economies". In New Haven, Connecticut, its arrival is linked with rising property prices and a general increase in downtown shopping. In Renton, Washington, city officials recently gave the key to the city to its 10-year-old Ikea store, the first time in 30 years they had done this for anyone or anything. Tempe, Arizona, gave Ikea land worth $1.8 million (€1.36 million) to encourage it to come. In many American states, it is seen as a tourist attraction.
Of course, not everyone is so welcoming. A new Ikea can lead to traffic meltdown in the surrounding area, threaten indigenous business and dominate its surroundings. Some criticise its precious design ethic, suggesting that in Ikea we suppress expression and settle for attractive mediocrity. "It may be better than the worst, but it's worse than the best," as one critic puts it.
In the movie Fight Club, the principal character, Jack, sees Ikea as an icon of compliant cosiness, sterility, the softening of his masculinity and the homogenisation of culture in which people are reduced to seeking their individuality in their choice of duvet fabric. He is obsessed with the catalogue, addicted to buying furniture with Scandinavian names and environmentally bleached ethics. "I would flip through catalogues and wonder, 'What kind of dining set defines me as a person?' We used to read pornography. Now it was the Horchow Collection."
Of course, if you're like Jack you could simply shop elsewhere. But you can't go to Habitat, because Ikea bought that chain in 1992. Now, it is considering going into the hotel business, so that the catalogue will truly spring open like a pop-up book. Some day we may wake up unsure as to whether we're living in the real world or the Ikea catalogue.