Cultural imperialism, Swedish style

We’re renting an unfurnished apartment for this year and before we could move in we had to get beds, chairs and tables. We began by going to the ancient wood-carving village of Sanyi in the Taiwanese mountains where they sell gorgeous and very expensive furniture. Then we went to the local Hsinchu mall where they sell very ugly and cheap furniture. Then we went to IKEA. There are three IKEAs in Taiwan and as everywhere else in the world the stores are crammed with people eating meatballs and trying out beds. Forget Americanization, the world is slowly being Swedified.
Swedes have a love/hate relationship to the furniture giant. We were fed up with the stuff years ago. Among my first childhood memories is my father swearing as he failed to put together some flatpack. He was still assembling flatpacks, and still swearing, the day before he died. And yet we keep on coming back. The particular combination of nice design, low price and poor quality exemplified by the IKEA experience no other furniture maker has managed to rival.

Our house now looks like it was inhabited by an anxious Electrolux executive on his first foreign assignment. We sleep on “Gutevik,” sit on “Bredaga” and switch on “Knivsta” when it gets dark in the evening. (Knivsta, in case you wonder, is a pit of a village a little north of Stockholm. Thanks to IKEA it is achieving undeserved world fame).

If we only had thought about it we should have had IKEA help us move. First we should have taken advantage of their admittedly great returns policy and handed back all the stuff we bought at the IKEA store in Edmonton. With the money we should have gone to the IKEA store in Taipei and bought it all back again. That way we could have turned the tables — if that’s the right expression — both on IKEA and on globalization.