Ikea: Shopping at the Apocalypse

It is the law that every Oregonian must, at some point, pay a visit to the new Portland Ikea store, so today we did our duty. It was one of the most monumentally unpleasant shopping experiences I've ever had. It was, in fact the Singularity of Unpleasant Shopping Experiences, the pinnacle and/or the nadir, the most painful hours I've ever spend inside a retail establishment, bar none.

First, the crowds. Oh. My. God. The above photo was taken in the parking lot. The first indication that we had penetrated the veil between the Earthly realm and Hell was the presence of orange-vested parking attendants guiding the desultory bumper-to-bumper traffic through the acres of parking lot like it was Jack Sparrow personal appearance day at Disneyland. Any store that requires parking attendants at 10:15 on a Sunday morning: not worth it.

As part of the four-abreast crowd snaking its way through the vestibule and into the store like cholesterol-laden blood through an artery after a Denny's Grand Slam, you're confronted with an immediate choice: go to the child abandonment area, where parents blithely leave their offspring to be trained as future Swedish furniture assemblers, while being entertained by Ikea blood sports (photo, right); take the Escalator to Showroom Hell; or proceed immediately to the warehouse, where, like the threatening boulders on the Mine Train Ride, desk sets weighing hundreds of pounds balance precariously on stacks of boxes, threatening to tumble the next time little Timmy rams into them with his greased-lightening Ikea cart, which his parents told him to go amuse himself with while they tried to decide between the blanched almond and off white futon cover for the spare bedroom.

We chose: Escalator to Hell.

"Showroom" is really a misnomer. First of all, if there was anything to show, it couldn't be seen due to the tens of thousands of slow-moving, hollow-eyed gawkers who either stood in the middle of the too-narrow aisle and gaped with the slack-jawed amazement of someone who had never seen actual furniture, or swarmed over the room displays like particularly voracious piranha. We moved through the maze of rooms with a slowness that made the parking lot seem like a NASCAR qualifying event. There may have been some nice things there. I'll never know.

Tumbling out of the showroom floor into the relatively unpopulated warehouse was liberating until you realized that the cloud-piercing stacks of boxes were meaningless containers unless you knew the item number you wanted, which you could only get by passing through the showroom, which was of course so crowded that actually seeing any particular item was impossible. But by God, we weren't going to leave empty handed, so we went to the aisle that the map suggested might contain office furniture, picked a box low to the floor, hoisted it into the cart, and got the hell out of there.

I'm pretty happy with my new computer desk.