You are not the only one with a deep and visceral connection to IKEA. Never knew what IKEA was growing up. Hey, they didn’t have them in Ohio. There was a fabled one just outside of Pittsburgh, but our family never made the pilgrimage. It wasn’t until I moved to a very un-Breakfast at Tiffany’s NYC that I really knew what it was. And I would pour through their catalogue setting up my perfect apartment room. It was a materialistic approach to replacing the family feeling that was left broken when my parents decided to divorce the year before I left for college. They both moved into new places and sold the family home of my memories. When I returned for my 1st break, I went to CT where my Mother had relocated and got a seasonal job at Bloomingdale’s instead of returning to OH and getting a seasonal job at Higbee’s, and I never visited Akron again as my hometown. Years later, IKEA in Elizabeth NJ helped to provide something that was taken away from me at a time when I wasn’t really ready to lose it. It wasn’t until I started my own family in my mid 30s and had a chance to reinvent all my family’s history- that IKEA became something else. Something better.

I still struggle with the consumerist shadow when I stroll through the place, but I am a maximalist, and I like the temptation of trying to make it through non-furniture sections without buying anything - but then I end up getting surprisingly decent pizza or salmon in a tube on my way out. But now my wife and I take our 2 year old there and stroll around in the kid’s section and have swedish meatballs and strange dense caramel cakes for desert with lingonberry soda. And we are not alone. Many teens, 20s 30s and more gather at IKEA during the week when it isn’t crowded down in Red Hook Brooklyn, and very leisurely bask in the laid back, consumer friendly retail community that the Swedes perfected long ago and brought to the US. All hail a friendly business model!