Ikea

Is an addiction, and I can’t for the life of me work out why.
In all due respect to a shop I completely adore it simply shouldn’t work. Working in the service industry I have learnt one thing about the public, and that is that if given the choice, they will always want to pay someone to do it for them, whatever ‘it’ may be.
So how does ikea work?! I mean essentially you walk around a show room where you can’t actually pick out anything that you want, you have to write down names and codes and measurements to go and search through, what I can only describe as a maze, to load it onto your trolly yourself and que in a check out only to be told that the item you spent 20 mins trying to get into the trolly is the wrong way round and they cannot scan it so you have to move it yourself.
There is, I feel only one explanation to way this store is so popular, the tiny pencils.
Now stay with me here because this is about to get good.
Basically the only thing the public love more then getting someone else to do something for them is something free, and ikea have got this down to an art. A pencil, isn’t flashy, it isn’t obvious but it’s a kind of souvenir, everyone has an Ikea pencil in their home somewhere, and there is no limit on the amount that you can take which I must say my mother puts fully to the test. And then they take these pencils and make them invaluable, they are necessary to write down all the names of products with that you have spent so much time searching for yourself, that you can then pick up you have to wait until later to find them all over again but this time in a cold warehouse.
Then there’s the meatballs, which are foul, but they are Swedish meatballs or at least claim to be, which the comedian in me cannot say no to a mouthful of (cheeky)