Losing the Will to Live in IKEA

If you've ever seen the film Labyrinth then you'd understand how I felt this afternoon, trapped for hours in the tangled passageways and vast halls of the Southern Hemisphere's largest IKEA store. It's bad enough navigating through a normal store, but this one is designed to prevent you from taking the shortest route. Hapless victims are funneled through a zig-zag route of showrooms, a one-way circuit with narrow aisles and no useful shortcuts. At one stage I turned round and tried to return to the entrance instead of walking the 500 metres to the exit, but going against the flow was so difficult I had to abandon that foolish idea. Once you've reached the end of the showrooms, you still can't leave - you find yourself swept downstairs into the warehouse walking another several hundred metres towards the checkouts.

In one corner of the warehouse I found a dishevelled group of expeditioners from the Liege Street retirement village camping inside some pine wardrobes. They'd entered IKEA the previous Thursday not even looking for modular furniture, instead wanting to try the Swedish meatballs from the café. But their sense of direction had failed them, and with dodgy hips and doddery legs, they were building up their strength before making another attempt to escape that evening.

My trolley was on the small side.

In the end I left with a cheap set of crockery, but only after walking three entire circuits of the store. I vow never to return, in the same way that the hobbits would never return to the Mines of Moria after experiencing the horrors of the evils dwelling deep within.

To emphasize the malevolently designed layout, let me explain that the car park is on the ground floor, and the checkouts and most smaller items for sale are on the first floor. But it's not possible to reach the first floor without first wandering through the second floor in order to find the stairs down. This is cruel in anyone's language, but for navigationally impaired people, it is beyond their comprehension.




Observe how high the shelves reach into the clouds in the photo above.