Swedish Scandal

If Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA walked onto Dragon's Den today, Peter Jones would shoot him. His idea shouldn't work, not in the logical real world. "So we're going to have stores the size of small continents on the outskirts of major cities across the world. There is a one way system in place and anyone not following the stream will receive the evils from our employees. And we will fill our stores with so many items, people will spend all day travelling through the store just to find the plastic cups they wanted". Evan Davies would die.

Well, somehow this Swedish concoction, which is even more barmy than Sweden's only other decent export, the Koenigsegg (a mad hypercar which nearly killed The Stig on Top Gear) is one of the world's leading furniture brands. As I was getting lost in the stupid one way system, I wondered 'how'?

Last year they had a turnover of €22.7billion and employ around 120,000 people across the globe. It's a business on a massive scale.

But why and how does it work? I honestly have no idea. My auntie and uncle from Yorkshire swear by it. But they are from the North, and apart from Morrisons and Gregs it is the only other shop they trust.

So I thought ok, Northerners love it. But what about the goods it sells? Surely they must have something to with IKEA's success? Well I suppose they did virtually invent the entire idea of flatpack furniture. The fact you virtually buy an entire bedroom and have it so well packed you can carry it home on the back of your pushbike is quite a feat. But then it's too well packed. Honestly assembling some of the stuff would be like trying to assemble the International Space Station. In boxing gloves. In an asteroid field. It's such a perilous operation because it has to be so unbelievably perfect. And they always leave a damn nail or screw missing. The most important one too. And when that happens, you have to disassemble your beautiful new coffee table and try and get it back into the packaging so you can go back to IKEA, walk round the damn one-way system to get to customer services to exchange it. How your average Tobias or Benni back in Stockholm manages to get it into the cardboard box in the first place amazes me beyond belief.

And then everything's named! I couldn't believe it. No wonder they hire so many damn people, it's because they just all sit in a room coming up with Swedish-sounding gibberish. It's unbelievable how they've got the cheek to name everything from tape measures to plastic cups. And by the time I'd reached the end, it was obvious they'd exhausted the Swedish dictionary, because they'd given items people's names! I'm not kidding, there was a DVD cabinet called 'Billy'. And if you wanted the same DVD cabinet but with glass? Well of course, it's called 'Billy Myhom' or something like that (my Swedish is a bit rusty I apologise). Then there was a chair called 'Herman' and a desk called 'Markus'. I was at the point of breaking down in hysterics in the middle of the 'MarketPlace'.

So I left. Armed with a shit load of free pencils and tape measures that people can steal from the pencil and tape measure dispenser, I escaped. Not before being offered Swedish meatballs as the last insult to my intelligence. The words 'no deal' came to mind before Noel Edmunds put the phone down to the Swedish meatball-shaped Banker.

But I was still none the wiser. How can a store which virtually keeps you prisoner for several hours succeed? How can a store which hides the one item you're looking for in an obscure corner succeed? How can a store which has SHORTCUTS like fecking Mario Kart possibly be taken seriously. Well it clearly does, because after getting lost in 'bedrooms' and 'kitchen', I finally found the photo frames my parents needed, only to find that the tills were gridlocked. Honestly they couldn't have been more tightly packed if our friend Tobias from Stockholm had put them in an IKEA branded box himself...