A rather screedy but refreshing essay on how IKEA and Starbucks aren’t the root of all cultural evil. Nice.
You know what? I’m done with it. If your life is mediocre, I promise you, Ingvar Kamprad didn’t make it that way. You did. And if you’re so desperate for your own soixante-huit moment that you can sit there with a straight face and tell me that you’re being oppressed by flat-packable pine furniture with goofy pseudo-Scandinavian names, I’d advise you to spend a few days working with child slaves in the Sudan, or something.
(via BoingBoing)
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One day (back when I was employed), I was waiting for my morning quad espresso at Starbucks. Some guy was complaining about the line.
I turned around and said: “There’s about a hundred coffee carts on Wall Street, why not go to one of them?”
He grimaced and said: “This tastes better.”
As for Ikea, given my experiences in “real” furniture stores on the one end, and buying furniture in places like Caldor’s, Bradless, K-Mart, etc.–I’ll take Ikea. It’s reasonably priced, pretty sturdy, stands up to kids, and looks pretty good. Having several thousand books, I need decent but inexpensive bookshelves!
Yuppers.
While I joke about the ubiquity of Starbucks, we visit their ourselves not infrequently (there’s one by our supermarket). It hasn’t caused me to eschew other coffee vendors; it’s just encouraged me to drink more coffee (or coffee-based drinks). Bad for the waistline, but that’s about it.
Am I the only one who’s never been to either of those places?
Of course, I’ve also never watched a reality TV show, or even that Who Wants to Be a Millionaire thing that was so popular a while back.
You need to get out — er, stay in, uh, well, do something more often.
I’ve only heard of IKEA via Mil Milington’s “thing-my-girl-friend-and-I-have-argued-about”, and that Margret really seems to love the place.
Sounds like it is some sort of Scano-danish furniture place. Must be scarily uber-yuppie if they don’t even have a store in Cherry Creek. If that is the case, IKEA isn’t even on the same level of Cultural EVIL as say Nieman-Marcus.
Ikea does inexpensive furniture, often modular, assemble-yourself kind of stuff, usually with a European/Scandinavian flair in design and naming. It’s a great place to pick up decent decor on the cheap.
There are none in Colorado, largely because of distribution issues. Basically, the only metro area within some hundreds of miles that could support an Ikea is around Denver, and we’re just too small to fly solo. Most of the other stores are in the Northeast, Chicago, Houston, and West Coast. It’s a big box, and if we had one around here, it would likely be at one of the trendy upscale malls (Park Meadows, Flatiron); it’s too big a footprint for Cherry Creek.
Checking out the top metro area list, that seems to fit with the Ikea locations.
If Ikea would build a store in Florida I would buy all my stuff there. Heck, I’d even drive to {{shudder}} Miami.
Oh well. At least we have a Starbucks on every other corner here in Disneyworld.