Well yeah. I've been the Defender of the Faith where IKEA is concerned for a while now--it's where you go for furniture when you're one step more financially secure than yard-sale furniture (or parental castoffs). It's not heirloom quality or anything, but when I bought a coffee table for my crappy one-bedroom grad-school apartment, I didn't for a minute think I'd still be using it twenty years from now.

As far as big chain retail in general, when I'm in Cambridge or Berkeley (or Manhattan, for that matter), I'll take the indie coffeeshops and bookstores in a minute. But back in my hometown (which isn't cow-town rural, just mainline suburban New Jersey), Starbucks and Barnes & Noble have been like a little miracle. Before their arrival, there wasn't anywhere within a thirty-minute drive to get either decent coffee or interesting books. (there are a lot more coffee options now, but as far as books go, it's either B&N or the local store that focuses on Christian and self-help books.)

Yeah. I give Starbucks and Barnes & Noble full credit for the fact that you can now get a book and a decent cup of coffee in places like Lincoln, Nebraska. (Including credit for the fact that there are now other places to get a decent cup of coffee in Lincoln, Nebraska.)

The thing about Ikea that confused me most, for a long time, was that people always seemed to talk about it as if it were really fancy high-end upscale furniture, and so I felt uncultured because Ikea styles mostly don't aesthetically appeal to me.

After it was finally made clear to me that it's, as Susan put it, "one step more financially secure than yard-sale furniture," the whole Ikea thing made a lot more sense to me. I now even have (and quite like) an Ikea bookcase.

But the Ikea videogame walkthrough is still pretty accurate in describing my experience (sans the combat) the one time I went.

I'd never understood IKEA because I'd never seen one before. They don't have them down in the southland. My first experience was when I went out to LA last summer and our local friend took us. Now they're going to be opening one in Atlanta in next year.

My wife is so friggin' excited. Mainly because we need more bookcases, bookcases being one of those things that if you need a lot of them, you a) want them to be uniform and b) not cost much.

The thing many of tne anti-starbucks crowd miss is that it's the context that's the thing. Would I buy coffee from Starbucks in Santa Cruz? Never. But in Fayetteville it was that or Denny's; Starbucks was a godsend.

I would tend to dislike Starbucks more if they didn't provide health insurance and profit sharing to most of their workers, and didn't use fair trade beans. You can find worse, a LOT worse. I read an article somewhere that, 30 years from now, we're going to have a strong nostalgia factor for companies that now seem "evil" to the aforementioned members of our populace. Back in the 20s, I'm sure there was a lot of railing against Woolworth's with soda fountains.

Pär goes through cultural dissonance whenever he hears Americans talking about Ikea as a yuppie store. In Sweden, it's your basic household-goods place. Swedes don’t really don't do the Wal-Mart type of crappy furniture; Ikea is about as ground-level as you get, or need to. Everyone buys there.

I think most of our (Americans') confusion about Ikea comes from it being very much an import from a different culture. Symbols of class and style in America don't match up with Sweden’s, and we're trying to cram our meanings where they don’t fit.

Ikea represents something about Sweden as a whole in that (compared to the USA, at least) there isn't a vast divide between rich and poor. Most people in Sweden are what we'd think of as middle-class, financially: that is, they're reasonably comfortable and they don't have a lot of money to spare. Ikea was made for a country where people of all ages and places in life want to buy decent furnishings that look nice and won't fall apart on them, but aren't extravagantly priced.

Another cultural difference that's harder to quantify is that I think Swedes just generally don't have the same need to define identity and individuality through things like furniture, so the whole notion of equating the Ikea style with personal genericness doesn't apply. There's a lot mixed up in this, like complacent homogenity on the one hand and a nation-wide desperately insecure lack of identity on the other, but that's a whole nother discussion.

It is definitely a US thing. I try not to buy Ikea for the simple reason that everybody buys there, but still after days spent walking through outrageously-expensive-high-end stores and outrageously-crappy-with-marginally-lower-prices-low-end stores I always end up in my local Ikea. I sigh, decide one day I'll go into antiques, and buy. Actually, right now I'm sitting on an Ikea chair, my computer on an Ikea desk, and my books in an Ikea bookcase. Oh, well.

(I live in Belgium, BTW) :-)

I still haven’t been in an Ikea — I think it’s one of those things, like Quentin Tarantino, that I missed on account of being out of the country when it first got big. Eventually I’ll get around to throwing out all the folding bookshelves I have left over from college, and then I’ll probably give it a shot — more or less for the reasons you mention.

and what ı would gıve for a starbucks ın ankara, where fındıng decent coffee ıs a paın ın the *** ...

This from the only man I know who owns an ibrik.

It's bizarre. Coffee isn't as easy to come by here as you think. On the bus they served instant. The only coffee place I found in Ankara that specialized in coffee had french press stuff (and a selection of a few dozen types of beans, far more than my limited turkish could handle). Everyone on the streetcorners is selling and drinking *tea*. (It was easier in Istanbul as most of the places which sold tea also served kahve, but in Ankara that's definitely not the case).

Would you like an ibrik? There were some nice ones at the bazaar in istanbul, and i do have to go back. :)