Swedish and mobbed
WHY DO people shop? The question hangs in the air over Stoughton, where a new IKEA store has created colossal traffic jams and had customers standing in line for an hour at the door even after leaving their cars.
Why go through this? Why put the neighborhood through this? If a person needed a bookcase, say, or a set of dishes, that person could surely choose from plenty of places with parking lots that did not look like a medical emergency on the expressway.
The road leading to this retailing Oz is a big box boulevard loaded with warehouses full of furniture, plumbing supplies, power tools, household accessories, clothes, and just about everything else coming under the general heading of ''stuff."
Yet the huge blue warehouse with the yellow lettering rises like a giant magnet at the end of the road, pulling in cars as though it were the only retailer on the strip. The draw can be partly explained by the pack mentality -- everybody's there because everybody's there, and IKEA openings tend to bring out a lemming impulse in shoppers.
In February, frenzied crowds at the opening of a London store sent a half dozen people to the hospital. Last year three people were killed in an IKEA stampede in Saudi Arabia.
But to a shopping culture, a riot at the front door is probably an endorsement of sorts, and it fuels the mystique of the blue box.
There's also the allure of Scandinavia, which has worked its magic on American consumers with Marimekko fabrics, Scandinavian Design furniture, and Haagen-Dazs ice cream -- a made-up name that has no meaning in Danish or any other language.
IKEA is a word fashioned from the initials of Swedish founder Ingvar Kamprad, and the name of the farm (Elmtaryd) and village (Agunnaryd) where he grew up. The names, along with the ones on the company's furniture -- Varde, Lund Ekon, Fjaras, and Hensvik -- can tempt a shopper to affect a Swedish accent while enjoying an aura of international chic not generally available at Sears.
IKEA is where Home Depot meets Pottery Barn, for the muscle-flexers are made to feel as welcome as the Martha Stewart wannabes. That's because everything displayed upstairs with light, bright, airy style must be wrestled onto a cart as dead weight tonnage-in-a-box from shelves in a basement storage room. Sure, there are people available to help heft, but the store is built on the cost-saving credo: We sell it -- you carry it home and put it together with an Allen wrench.
Cost-saving is not necessarily time-saving, especially with a traffic jam coming and going. But logic is not the answer to the question hanging over Stoughton. IKEA is the answer -- at least until there's another big box with a stronger magnet.
