What’s Swedish for ‘self-assembly’?

The week­end was a pos­it­ive blur of flat-pack fur­niture pur­chas­ing, fol­lowed by hours of puzz­ling self-assembly at home, con­clud­ing with the dilemma about what to do with all that card­board packaging.

Yes, I went to IKEA.

I learned a great deal dur­ing my visit to this huge temple ded­ic­ated to flat-pack. I learned that I sound abso­lutely ridicu­lous when talk­ing to the store assistants:

“Yes, I see you have the Helmer in sil­ver, but I was won­der­ing if you had it in red and, if so, whether it would really fit with the Amon and the Inge. What do you think?”

Worse still, when say­ing these names I don’t just pro­nounce them nor­mally. Oh no. Instead, I try to add a kind of Scand­inavian inflex­ion, the res­ult being that I sound like the chef from the Muppets.

I also learned that going to IKEA is most def­in­itely not a sol­it­ary pur­suit. You should go with at least one other per­son, prefer­ably two. Their whole self-service ethos doesn’t really work very well if you’re on your own, par­tic­u­larly if you’re buy­ing a few very bulky items of fur­niture. At one point, I was strug­gling round the ware­house with two trol­leys, park­ing them in stra­tegic loc­a­tions while I dashed off to find a Nom­inell in Hult Black (don’t ask), then lug­ging the item back to where I hoped I’d left them. For­tu­nately, my nav­ig­a­tion skills are superb. Unfor­tu­nately, my steer­ing skills aren’t, and there were a few near misses where, if I hadn’t quickly swerved, I undoubtedly would have sent tod­dlers fly­ing across the aisles with trol­ley marks imprin­ted on their foreheads.

Of course, the less prac­tical reason for not shop­ping alone is that you won’t feel like you stick out like a sore thumb. Sur­roun­ded by couples and fam­il­ies, I couldn’t help but think:

“Oh, they’re all star­ing at me. They’re all pity­ing me because I obvi­ously live on my own, go shop­ping at IKEA on my own, and don’t even have a car in which to load my pur­chases when I’m done. They’re think­ing that I’m really, really sad.”

See­ing as IKEA pride them­selves on provid­ing a unique cus­tomer exper­i­ence, it sur­prises me that they haven’t con­sidered the Hire Your Own Shop­ping Part­ner ser­vice. I can clearly ima­gine the advert­ising pitch:

“Spare those blushes, and get help with load­ing your trol­ley into the bar­gain. If you’re shop­ping alone, go to our cus­tomer ser­vice desk on arrival and request our all-new product — Flo­grur. Flo­grur is our quiet, attent­ive and help­ful com­pan­ion for brows­ing round the store — and he or she won’t make other shop­pers pity you for being single!”

The final obser­va­tion about IKEA is that, well, as much as I feel I should jus­ti­fi­ably hate it — mostly for being so bloody ubi­quit­ous and down­right pop­u­lar; the sort of place that people flock to in their thou­sands at the week­end — I just can’t. Give or take a few gripes (mostly caused by the afore­men­tioned Urban Trol­ley Com­bat exper­i­ence), where else could I man­age to quickly and effect­ively fur­nish my entire flat at such a decent price? (I’m not telling you how much I spent because, while it was undoubtedly more than I inten­ded to spend, it was still bloody good value). Of course I would love to go to some more exclus­ive stores, pos­sibly even browse sales for some inter­est­ing antiques — but time, and most import­antly budget, simply won’t allow.

So, yes, I kind of loathe IKEA — but like a ded­ic­ated Sat­urday shop­per, as the doors swung open at 9.00am on the dot to let in the hordes, I was already there with the items I required circled in my cata­logue, gear­ing up to go wild in the aisles.