Ikea

Ikea is a ‘Scandinavian’ self-assembly furniture shop. Well, it’s lots of shops. Huge shops. They are making an absolute fortune for the owners, because somehow they discovered how to tap into the female shopping gene.

Females are able to ignore all logic and danger when their shopping gene (or maybe it’s a hormone, if there’s any difference between genes and hormones in women) has kicked in. Triggers appear to usually be shoes or handbags. In pursuit of these, and the undefined word ‘bargain’, women will fight each other to the death. They will also ignore the fact that they are likely to be crushed to pulp in crowds, or die from heat exhaustion, and instead focus on their one goal – the purchase.

Some years ago the man behind Ikea managed to work out how to trigger the response normally reserved for shoes and handbags, but with self-assembly flat-pack furniture, soft furnishings, lighting and other ‘home’ based stuff. Clever bastard. How other men hate him.

Ikea has made such an impact in modern society that estimations are that through-out the EU, 10% of conceptions are achieved in an Ikea bed. I’m assuming this is NOT just one bed somewhere that everybody goes to, but … well, you know what I mean. I also assume that’s not on the first night of trying to assemble the bloody thing. Women (the bitches) normally leave this part of the process to the man, who ends up too knackered to help her conceive after hours of trying to ‘easy’ assemble the impossible.

Ikea’s magnet is so powerful that three people died in scuffles and crushes during a stampede of hundreds trying to get a bargain when the new store opened in Saudi.

One scary week, a store just down the road from me opened (well, it’s not exactly just down the road, but it is dangerously closer that the other ones. I say dangerously because I’ve noticed a woman twitching as she sniffs the air and definitely has its scent to the point where she’s pacing with that glazed look in her eyes). It opened at Midnight and closed half an hour later after everything went wrong. Crowds surged forward and there was panic and people were hurt. That’s all sorted now and the store has re-opened quietly.

That won’t stop the mad Sunday shoppers though, causing yet more scary crushing. Now, men have logic and method to their shopping abilities. They know it makes sense to take time off work and visit on a weekday. The place will be less hot, people won’t be pushing and shoving, and the queues for the checkouts won’t be so long that they have entertainers doing complete shows whilst you wait. However, women want to go on Sundays or Bank Holidays. It may well be that they deliberately pick this as a torture that women use against men, one of their anti-male sports (you know, they all nod and wink at each other at how funny their stressed males look as they are dragged around, but men don’t see this, being pre-occupied with whether or not their last will and testament is up to date). Women do this to get back at men following an argument from four or five years ago that the man just can’t remember.

The stores (all of them) are designed so badly (deliberately) that you have to march along with the 2,000 other visitors in quite a scary way through bottlenecks and areas where nobody is moving and there is no oxygen. Exit signs are not marked properly (well, yes the Emergency ones are), so there appears to be no short-cut to get away from being on the huge conga chain. Yes, you may want to make a bee-line to a particular thing, but you ain’t going to. You will have to slowly walk past everything else first. Those are the rules, and the ladies love them.

Anyway, I have yet to be dragged to the new store, despite it supposedly being the largest. The England household did have it mentioned quite a few times before I had to use the industrial strength gaffer tape over the mouth trick, and shorten the chain that keeps her in the kitchen. Since the riots I have been constantly subliminally moaning about what a terrible and DANGEROUS place Ikea is. I even brought up the story of the deaths in the Ikea in Saudi to try to emphasise the point. Whether or not this will work I’m not sure. The need to go to Ikea is genetically imprinted into females.

I may have no option but to face this inevitable evil. May god have mercy on my soul.