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IKEA: Simply the Besta
By Kyle | March 9, 2008
In my Sunday column today I ask the question: is IKEA a Swedish-socialist Utopia or a libertarian paradise in disguise?
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Let us remove our two-horned helmets and sing the epic of IKEA. Praise to all your Ringos and Rimfrosts, your Oddvar habit of giving furniture names like Fartfull and Beslut. I love those saucy umlauts, like ripe lingonberries, and the way your 100% cotton tie-back curtains carry the name Alvine Vaxt, which I think was also the name of the villain in “Moonraker.”
Like all great Nordic myths, IKEA, you swing your mighty hammer on the anvil of despair, somewhere in the desolate fjords of your soul. Your founder’s grandfather killed himself with a shotgun. Your founder himself attended Nazi meetings as a youth. And many of the living rooms in your catalogues resemble the set of Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage,” suggesting Liv Ullmann is lurking just off the page in marital anguish.
A man was stabbed and five people were taken to the hospital in a North London stampede when IKEA opened its doors there in 2005. The year before, in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, three people died and 17 were injured in the grand-opening madness. To these sad tidings I say: every man dies. Not every man has the honor to die for modular furniture and tiny meatballs.
Yet when I visit IKEA (yes, an acronym: the I and the K are the initials of its founder, Ingvar Kamprad, the fourth richest person in the world; the E and the A are for the farm and village where he grew up), it’s always the mid-70s, and the world is bright. I’m not too old to sit in a beanbag chair and “Dancing Queen” is at the top of the charts. (Which came first, Benny and Bjorn or Arild and Anga, IKEA’s sofa and TV bench?)
IKEA already has a store in Siberia, but at last it has brought its Hopen, as well as its Fangst, to a truly challenging retail environment: New York City. The Red Hook, Brooklyn store is hiring and preparing to open its doors. Now the financial center of the world will get a lesson–in cold-eyed capitalism. Libertarians should be Fargglad. I’m not being Snartig when I say IKEA isn’t soft cushiony socialism; it’s Wal-Mart in Democrat drag.
Outsourcing? IKEA invented it. In the 1960s, when Sweden’s furniture cartel tried to drive it out of business by organizing a boycott of suppliers, IKEA went to Poland for materials. Today it outsources its customers, sending us on free buses from Manhattan to Elizabeth, N.J.
Taxes? IKEA hates them. At the onshore tax haven underneath Newark Airport’s flight patterns, you pay half–3.5 percent–of the typical New Jersey tax rate. Kamprad is a tax refugee living in Switzerland, not Sweden, and the complicated corporate structure of IKEA, which is run by a taxman-disorienting array of holding companies, drives down its Eurotaxes.
Imagine what would happen if Macy’s were subjected to a “ruthless” business model, i.e. one that put customers ahead of job creation. Macy’s is run like a Soviet train station, where one guy sells your ticket, another guy inspects it, a third guy tears it, and nobody can tell you what train goes where. The last time I was in Macy’s to test-drive a sofa, four different sales gnats came buzzing around me in search of a commission. There were three customers. Fire the hard-sellers, lower the price of the sofa by $200 and you’ve got IKEA, where most items can simply be picked up and rolled out the door. At the entrance there is a sign: “No one will bother you.” Five words, one libertarian ideal.
IKEA automates, meaning fewer surly minimum-wage zombies to deal with at every turn. Want an IKEA credit card? Go up to a kiosk in the store, punch in your information, and your new credit card number is printed on the spot, in minutes. At checkout, you can scan and ring up the merch yourself, meaning shorter waits. Conservatives should be pleased that self-sufficiency is taught as a character imperative at IKEA. Wrote Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian: “Ikea’s moral crusade extends uncompromisingly to the customer. Whether you like it or not, it intends to teach you the value of good, honest, simple hard work. Self-assembly, viewed from this perspective, is more than a cost-cutting measure: it’s a tool of evangelism, designed to make you sweat for your own edification.”
Like Wal-Mart, IKEA stringently enforces cost-cutting measures–making even senior executives fly coach and stay in cheap hotels. If anyone’s feelings are hurt, they are as disposable as the lamp in the 2002 Spike Jonze IKEA commercial. The lamp is like a homeless urchin, discarded by its owner and left on the curb in the merciless rain. Who will rescue the lost little lamp? Shouldn’t we be building lamp shelters so this won’t happen again? Suddenly, a nutty Swedish man enters the frame, saying, “Many of you feel bad for dis lamp. Dat is because you crazy. Duh lamp has no feelings! And the new one is much bedder!” Fangst for everything, IKEA. You’re the Besta.
Topics: Advertising, Philosophy, Uncategorized |