George Cooper: 'The retail centre cannot hold'

We’re told we have a hardwired fight or flight impulse. But sometimes life harbours more subtle perils that demand a richer spectrum of recoil. I learned this lesson whenever my parents took me to IKEA, in the mid-90s, and I’d find myself careering along a one-way system designed to convert anxiety into commerce. Instead of outright flight, I’d cleave to the homogenous bedspreads, run my fingers through synthetic lambskin and sleep. Going to sleep, as an escape from the gnawing unease of coercive furniture shopping, served me well as a child. But now, an adult, a parent and a homeowner, the inoffensive pine tables of yesteryear have turned, and I find myself drawn to their democratic price point.

My wife and I bought a house in Reading just after our daughter was born. One year later, in 2021, we emerged from self-imposed house arrest into a commuter-belt town with nowhere to commute, and with a toddler with no concept of IRL retail. We soon discovered that as a family without a community, we needed to re-centre ourselves in West Berkshire’s writhing meatspace. For me, this meant an almost daily visit to the IKEA superstore, just off the M4.

The first thing I noticed, returning to the fabled IKEA canteen after so many years, was the crowd of displaced men staring absently out of the plate-glass atrium overlooking the carpark, surrounded by plastic monstera deliciosa and the like. I turned from the canteen to find their children, darting from havsta to voxtorp, squeezing under a skruvby, scrambling inside a spiksmed, animating the lifeless storage vessels. Then to the shop-floor staff in their obsequious yellow uniforms, permitting us to shout “Hej!" if something went wrong – like if our children were muddled by the locking mechanism of a modular wardrobe or the verisimilitude of the bathroom section. This was a lightbulb (molnart) moment for me. All these dads in IKEA, holding forth on Teams, while the yellow shirts double-up as undervalued au-pairs for negligent remote workers.

Once a byword for numbing homogeneity, IKEA struck me, then, as a sanctuary for the over-stretched. Especially when I realised you don't have to buy anything. IKEA is free soft play with no party tunes. The coffee is more palatable than the fashionably rancid stuff I've got on subscription. IKEA is a retreat from life’s labours, where one can take stock and engage in meaningful conversation, like the one about the noise Phil makes in the morning when he remembers he’s got two children.

After a few weeks in this burgeoning community of unburdened dad-bros, I was afforded a fresh perspective. Like fruit picking or bushcraft, flat-pack furniture shopping can be reframed as a chillaxed family experience. We can invert the one-way system and accelerate to the soft toys. We can stuff our trolleys with cuddly snakes (djungelskog) to divert our children in the bedroom section.Then we can get lunch for a tenner. And they have balloon modellers on Saturdays!

Looking back now, those early post-pandemic years were the zenith of retail sanctuary. But in 2023, our first year of ‘normal’ – the year of conflict and thrift – something changed in the waters of our oasis. It all began so ordinarily.

“We could just nip in? The monstera needs repotting.”

“It’s plastic.”

“Or Jake’s Playbarn?”

“I suppose we’ve run out of soy meatballs.”

Such is the dialogue of hubris, as we embarked on a half-term IKEA trip, hopelessly incognisant of the tides and rhythms of the school calendar. On arrival, I was overcome by a feeling that something bad lay in the bushes ahead. It was the barriers barring entry to the first three levels of the carpark. It was the blank stares of fourteen adults bursting out of a ten-capacity lift. It was the domestic miscellanea spewing onto the tarmac around them. It was the sound of children screaming.

My neck prickled with the static of flight but once you’re in, you’re in. No room for a trolley in the shop-floor’s charging rivulets, tethered only to their relentless unidirectionality. This is where the one-way system is supposed to come into its own, channelling consumers along the longest yet surest route to freedom. As we hit the bedroom section, something glitched in our daughter's circuitry. She darted from our grasp, tracing a nimble path through feet and wheels and blandly aspirational mock-up bedrooms where everything has its place.

We tracked her to the canteen, where the magnitude of our folly was in full relief. A mass of humanity compressed to carbon-polymers of flesh and bone and moulded plastic; parents, prone, over children; a thousand tiny plates, a thousand tiny mouths working through IKEA’s ubiquitous protein balls. My daughter made a break for the kitchen and I screamed, "HEJ!" as a yellow shirt ushered her away for her protection.

I collapsed by the wall of rotating ball mazes and took stock, while my wife escorted our daughter to the breastfeeding room. In less than a minute, I heard my name. I ran to the padded antechamber, which was laid out like a home office in miniature: two rotating chairs with no armrests; an ankle-level pine coffee table; one or two plastic houseplants in plastic houseplant pots. It had the look of a breastfeeding room arranged by someone without breasts, and for administrative purposes. This observation comes only in retrospect. In the moment, my senses were wholly occupied by the smell of the plastic plant that my wife was holding.

I looked to her for some kind of visual cue, then to my daughter on one of the rotating chairs, staring at her feet. I looked back to the plant pot, half full of some murky brown fluid. The room smelled like a hot underpass where human waste has festered, only for that waste to be collected and reduced to its rawest form beneath a plastic houseplant in Reading's IKEA superstore, just off the M4.

"It's poo-wee, Daddy."

In an instant, I flew. I held my daughter to my chest and wrenched my wife's unsoiled left hand. As I did, I collided with a mother coming the other way and shouted, "I'm sorry!" implicating myself in the horrific scene that lay beyond the pleated grey curtain.

We charged upstream, the accusatory arrow spotlights turned against us, as we traced the path of greatest resistance to the entrance. We burst out of the lift into the carpark, tumbling over egg slicers and rubber spatulas and cork coasters, scrambling back to the car. We sped out of the carpark, spiralling down to the ground floor to find a makeshift barrier of traffic cones extended across two lanes, now barring exit from the store. I turned to my wife, scrubbing at my daughter’s tights, marked indelibly with plant-pot soilage. Once a refuge for isolated and squeezed families, the benign character of IKEA had pivoted again. The retail centre cannot hold; the murky brown tide is loosed; and everywhere, the ceremony of innocence is drowned. I accelerated towards the cones.

Back home, I was alone with my daughter while my wife boiled her clothes and showered. I looked around our living room. The jute rugs (lohals). The modular toy storage (trofast). The plastic plant (fejka), hanging in a plastic pot (förenlig). Then to my daughter, curled up on the sofa (hyltarp), under her blanket (humlemott), running her hands through a synthetic lambskin (svindinge). "Lie with me, Daddy." I slid under the blanket. I caressed the lambskin. I slept.

George Cooper is an academic publisher and part-time PhD candidate at University College London, researching the censorship of online scholarship in China. He has written for several publications, including Times Higher Education and The State of the Arts.

Image credit: "catálogo ikea 2007" by mikelo is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.