Journal Ethelred Unraed's Journal: Germans and Ikea 36

This started out as a response to Allen Zadr's journal about Ikea, but got a bit longish, so here's a JE instead.

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You don't know how true it is when you say Ikea's stuff looks European. For if you visit the home of anyone in Germany who is under 40, I guarantee you will find at least a few items from Ikea, and even for those over 40 there's a good chance they'll have something, too.

Some places are almost entirely furnished with Ikea items, particularly if it's students or the recently graduated.

It's partly because the competition is so lame -- inexpensive build-it-yourself furniture is fairly common, but most of it is shoddy beyond belief, while anything more solid tends to be drab and ugly and ridiculously expensive. Ikea found a kind of golden middle, and no one else seems to have figured out how to challenge them on it over here.

The other thing Ikea has down well -- and it's crazy to have to point it out -- is that they are remarkably family-friendly. You might take this for granted in America, but it's at times shocking how little provision is made for families, especially those with small children. The unstated expectation is that you're supposed to stay at home until they get older, because kids aren't to be seen in polite society. (And then they wonder why the birth rate is in the toilet.) Ikea, by contrast, makes all kinds of effort to provide for kids there, from having a supervised play area to offering free food for babies and cheap meals for kids, to offering discounts to families, and so on. No other store I know of in Germany does anything remotely like it -- except, ironically, Wal-Mart.

The sad thing is, though, that you visit other people's homes and see stuff you have yourself (or at least looked at in the catalog). Thus I tease West Germans, who used to mock East Germans for all having the same cheap standardized furniture and clothing, because the West Germans are now doing the same thing.

My workroom is about half Ikea stuff. Two desks, a bookshelf, curtain rod, a dresser that I use for storing paper and disk media, a rollaway cabinet, various picture frames and so on. We also have a kitchen from Ikea, the kids' room practically looks like an Ikea catalogue (right down to the sun-shaped ceiling light and ladybug-shaped wall lights), our dining table is from Ikea, various rugs, the bathroom furnishings are mostly Ikea and so on. Kinda sad, really...

Currently there is one Ikea near Hannover, in a small town on the outer edge of Hannover's metro area (Hannover's population: about 500,000, greater Hannover region about 1 million), but the demand is such that they are opening a second, much larger one on the southern edge of the city itself (a stone's throw from us), on the former Expo 2000 grounds (and across from CeBIT -- traffic's gonna be real fun).

Resistance is futile!