I needed/wanted a kitchen cupboard with pull-out drawers so you can see everything. It would put an end to buying a second, third or even fourth jar of mustard or mixed herbs or whatever because the earlier lot had disappeared in a jungle of jars, bottles and packets.
And so in the month of the publication of (ital) Not Buying It. My Year Without Shopping (end ital), I found myself at the Ikea store in Sydney.
Here was a more accurate glimpse of our times than the spikes and troughs of extreme and unusual events that occupy the pages of newspapers and the waves of the broadcast spectrum.
An astonishing 30,000 go to the Sydney store on an average weekend — shopping as entertainment.
Ikea likes to build huge stores. This is why they have no presence in Canberra. The stores in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide are more than 20,000 square metres. That is one shop about a third the size of Woden Plaza with its 230 shops and eight-screen cinema.
The place is so large that people lose each other. I saw many a shopper on the mobile asking, “Where are you?”
The design is artful. Shoppers walk along a route passing examples of open-cut rooms constructed with Ikea furniture and every conceivable piece of bric-a-brac. Only a skilled orienteer could find a quick way to the single desired item and out to the check-out. The rest are forced to wind their way past everything on offer.
It is difficult to get out of the place without, in the words of Clive Hamilton of the Australia Institute, buying something you don’t need with money you haven’t got to please people you don’t like.
The place is designed somewhat like a casino. There are no windows so you lose your sense of time. And, just like in a casino, the food and beverages (yes the store has its own café) are very cheap — $3.95 for Swedish meatballs and chips. Shoppers have no excuse to leave Ikea for a meal – stay and shop.
All the furniture comes in cardboard flat-packs and you piece it together at home.
Here are the fruits of containerisation and globalisation.
The cupboard I bought had pieces from China (obviously) but also Austria, Italy and Slovakia.
The flat pack was less than a tenth of the volume of the finished product.
I am not knocking it; to the contrary. This intelligent design can improve people’s standard of living — if used judiciously.
Modern life’s tension between capitalism, consumers and environment is more patent at Ikea than anywhere I have seen. Many of the products are well-designed and practical. But there is a fair amount of tasteless and useless junk. The capitalist urges the consumer to over-buy. Wise consumers seek a reasonable standard of living. Good designers seek to do more with less, thus reducing environmental impacts and appealing to both consumers and the capitalists that sell the well-designed goods to them.
The flat pack is a response to unit living. Furniture can be brought inside for assembly rather than banging it against the stairwell in back-destroying agony.
Once home, however, the joys and frustrations of do-it-yourself emerge. Remember, very few of those 30,000 people live close to the store. If something is missing or you have mis-measured the hole for the cupboard, all at once you are using language that would make a sailor blush. It means a long trek back to the store.
Ikea, incidentally, does not do mail order. Nor does it take orders over the phone or do lay-bys. Indeed, all of the onus, stress and risk are moved from the shareholders and staff to the customers.
Customers have to find flat packs of the assembled things on display in the colour and size they want in a warehouse section of the store near the check-out. The customer becomes the storeman and obviously the deliverer and assembler. It is a classic example of a company passing all the labour-intensive and expensive parts of its operation to the customer with only some of the savings passed on in lower prices.
And speaking of assembly, Ikea has its international market down pat. All of the instructions are in diagram form. There are no words to be translated into dozens of languages. The only word I could see was CLICK in capitals next to smiling man putting to parts together.
It can spell disaster. A diagram cannot warn of pitfalls, one of which I fell into. I won’t bore you with the details, suffice it to say that I CLICKED the wrong panel into the sides of a very sturdy Austrian-built drawer. It was anschluss. There was no way it would just UNCLICK.
Some hours and several bleeding knuckles later, the thing was assembled. I felt a triumph of satisfaction.
How often do we find misleading, incomprehensible instructions these days? We forget they are written (or drawn) by fallible human beings, like us.
And how we flock to the new religion of shopping and home-building. Last year, the Ikea catalogue out-published the Bible (in all its translations) by 160 million to something less than 100 million.