It probably shouldn’t make me this sore

There are many problems associated with shopping at IKEA, first and foremost being the fact that by the time you’ve finished assembling the furniture that looked so lovely in the showroom, puzzling over the pictures-only instruction manuals and grunting each screw into its slightly off-center home, you kind of hate it. And maybe most of your new furniture requires a Philips-head screw driver to put together, and you only have one (despite your owning roughly a dozen flat-tip ones) that has a tiny shaft and a strong propensity to give you blisters. And maybe crouching in one position for several hours while wrestling with an Allen wrench causes some buried muscle in your back and groin to pang most sorrowfully all the next day. And maybe the bedside table you purchased mistakenly came with only two legs and you have to prop it up with six books of The Chronicles of Narnia until the forgotten ones arrive in the mail along with Ikea’s heartfelt condolences.

It could have been a lot worse, I suppose. The 250-pound load strapped with polyurethane twine to the roof of my Tercel could have blown off and caused a five-car pileup between here and Renton. A dozen boxed-up bookshelves could have fallen off of a shelf in the self-service warehouse and broken every bone in my body. Or I could have become lost in the endlessly winding corridors of consumer goods, never to emerge again.

As it was, Alice and I made out with two six-foot bookshelves, a coffee table, a nightstand, a floor lamp, and a desk, as well as various sundries such as wastebaskets. We rotated the TV part of the living room 90 degrees, effectively partitioning the space into a TV nook and a sitting room, the latter of which now features as centerpiece an admittedly handsome, although achingly troublesome to assemble, coffee table. I won’t even begin to tell you which fake Swedish words correspond to the furniture we bought, for the coffee table or any other piece. Fine, Vellkspar, OK? See, you have no way of knowing if I made that up.

I hadn’t been to the Ikea in years, and Alice had never been, so the experience left us understandably overwhelmed. What they’ve done in their stores is take a breathtakingly huge open space and put up walls of products to steer customers in a meandering stream so that one passes by every single item in the store by the time one leaves, never getting a real idea of how large the store actually is. There are even little arrow decals on the floor to direct the flow of human freight, pushing their shopping carts and herding their screaming children between the aisles of credenzas and hutches. Because the Ikea in Renton is the only one in the state, the crowd is uniformly thick, a literal wall of people at all times pushing you in the direction of the arrows or stopping suddenly just in front of your 200-pound shopping cart and then giving you a dirty look when you say “excuse me.” For someone who doesn’t especially like people, it’s a harrowing experience. By the time the loading-zone employee handed me the hold-harmless agreement to sign before tying the bookshelves and desks to the roof of the car, I was willing to sign anything just be able to leave. The form could have willed all my organs over to the Swedish government; I still would have signed it.

If their furniture didn’t come in compact cardboard boxes and sell for so ridiculously cheap, that company would be in a lot of trouble.