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This weekend, on the way home from a night of partying in South Beach, a friend and I decided that we would polish off our trip with a stop at the new IKEA store that recently opened in Sunrise, Fla.

I've been to IKEA before in a few other cities, and I had already expressed my doubts about any furniture store that offers free meatballs, but my friend was pretty excited about it, so I reluctantly exited I-595 and prepared for the worst.

The experience, or rather nightmare, began immediately on the exit ramp. We sat in traffic for a while, waiting as police directed us onto another street with numerous traffic lights. When we got closer to the IKEA parking lot entrance we discovered the root of the problem: the lot was already full.



Large, flashing traffic signs directed us further down the street.

"IKEA overflow parking, 1 mile.”

My friend and I looked at each other each hoping the other would be the first to veto the idea of walking a mile to peruse an over-sized European furniture store. Just then, a stream of trolleys flew by us, carrying eager shoppers from the overflow lot back toward the store.

"Surely, they don't have trolleys for IKEA," I said, right before a blue one zoomed by with a big IKEA logo stuck to it.

I tried to look at the faces of the trolley passengers. Who were these people willing to take a bus to a furniture store? But the trolley’s windows were tinted, and its occupants remained safely anonymous.

We continued inching down the road, from traffic light to traffic light. My left foot had begun cramping from all the clutch work, and my mind raced with ways to break it to my friend that I had had about enough. Luckily, just at that moment, she looked at me and declared her objection to the whole situation with an enthusiastic "FUCK THIS!" At the next stoplight I made an equally enthusiastic U-turn.

The trip back to the highway was just as strange and annoying as the trip in. I think we were both a little disappointed about our plans being shut down, but only until we drove past the main entrance.

Through the maze of parking cones and roadblocks, we saw the front doors to the temple of sleekly designed futons and bookshelves. A huge line of people stretched from the entrance. At about 3 p.m. on Sunday these were not eager customers waiting for the store to open. This was actually a line of very patient idiots waiting for enough room in the store to get in.

At a packed nightclub the bouncer would huff, “We’re at capacity.” Maybe IKEA should invest in some burly, black-clad goons to check credit cards at the door.



If you've never been to an IKEA yourself, allow me to explain the madness that is this superstore should you ever make it inside:

The store is set up as one big path that you follow through all the departments. Unlike most mega stores, you can't just walk in the front door and say, "let’s hit the bedroom department." Oh no. If you want to see a four-poster bed, you better be ready to check out an ergonomically designed ottoman, some abstract shelving and a few floating picture frames first.

I suppose you could find someone and demand they lead you directly to office furniture, but I doubt they would be happy about it, and doing so may be defaulting on your meatball privileges. Heaven forbid!

You can imagine how this pathway through the furniture forest could result in some uncomfortable clogging. Just picture the human traffic jam with the maximum number of shoppers allowed by the fire marshal all taking their time to browse through display after display and ponder how much they need a three-roll stainless steel paper towel dispenser.

It's a recipe for a serious panic attack.

Scenes like this can easily get me worked up into a frenzy about my general contempt for large-scale, sensationalized consumerism – Could this really be just an innocent capitalist venture? Do they expect that IKEA can distract us from our environmental problems and the war? Will a stylish new bedroom set appease me enough to forget all the injustice in the world?

Sadly, the fact is, that I would have been one of those sad souls wandering through the IKEA maze, had it not been so damn frustrating to park my car.

As I pull back onto the highway, it occurs to me that maybe a shopping day at IKEA is nothing serious at all. Maybe it’s really just about the futons and Scandinavian meatballs.

-Todd Soligo