Ikea is one of those stores I rarely go to, but when I do I always really enjoy it and always end up buying something. Usually not furniture—more like housewares, kitchen items, and the odd food item (the meatballs are just okay, although I fondly remember them being the first thing I brought to lunch for the first day of my first real in-office internship back in grad school.)

We used to go more often because Ikea in College Park, Maryland is about five minutes from the apartment complex we used to live in back then. Now Ikea is a rare treat. There’s also one in Woodbridge, Virginia, but that’s just about as far as College Park. I think this map, in the Ikea store in College Park, is really interesting. It basically shows you the geography of Ikea’s customer base and demographics. It’s interesting how many chain stores are just missing in rural America. Even Walmart is unevenly located in more remote places. (Although you’d have to go far past the edges of this map to get to Walmart-won’t-locate-here territory.)

How long, I wonder, before these borders expand? Where is the next Ikea store going? Maybe those small planning/pick-up stores—first introduced in Northern Virginia in 2023—will expand and serve a sort of quasi-e-commerce role without having to build new warehouses/stores?

This is another thing that was new to me since my last visit: Ikea now operates a sort of store-within-a-store where they sell not only the floor models or slightly damaged pieces (I think they always did) but also secondhand furniture that customers have traded in!

Now that is really, really cool. I can’t think of another retailer that explicitly invites its secondary market to compete with itself. Not that you can do all your furniture shopping that way, and online comments suggest that it’s not always easy to find anything worthwhile. But it’s cool nonetheless.

Funny thing—it reminds me of my capstone project in grad school, which was about finding ways for municipalities with e-waste programs to somehow monetize the good stuff people would bring in for recycling. (As if to prove the point, on my first visit to the College Park public works headquarters, I fished a fully functional Commodore 64 computer out of the e-waste pile.)

Which brings me to something very tangential to Ikea shopping, but which I find fascinating: where do the props come from?

That fake Xbox is some kind of actual knockoff game console from a developing-world market, I think. The Logitech joystick is the one my dad had for Flight Simulator in the early 2000s. The laptop is real. The gaming keyboard without the keys is also real.

There are prop-company props on display in various parts of the store, like fake televisions which are just a black plastic frame and plexiglass sheet for the screen. But some of the props are actual used electronics that must have been bought from e-waste collectors or recyclers. I would so love to know exactly who buys, selects, and stages these items, and how they end up on the sales floor displays.

I also appreciated this:

It’s a (sort of) local recipe, which I assume Ikea does in every store.

However, I’ll pass on the air-filter lamp:

I know when I’m being marketed to, but with these guys I don’t mind it. There’s something really comfortingly normal about Ikea. There’s none of the high-pressure salespeople following you around, for one. But much more than that, it’s about as real life as you can get. You can forget all the garbage and nonsense on the internet and out in the world and look closely at which set of drawers would be the most useful or which baking tray would work for that dish you can’t quite make with your current one. I like getting lost in things that don’t matter, but matter more than anything.

Ikea is like a little tap on the shoulder that the real world exists.

Related Reading:

Office Depot Time Capsule

Secondhand Supermarkets

Cart Dependence

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