The Ikea Effect
Imagine a society where everyone has the same crappy furniture and they’re perfectly happy with it. That’s not really the concept behind the Ikea Effect but they’re its consequences.
I personally dislike Ikea in the same way I despise Nazi Propaganda. Ikea is a trick, and probably the most successful model of selling cheap stuff of the century. Its narrative it’s incredibly powerful and compelling because your entire experience buying that ugly coffee table is biased by a handful of experiences and events that carry an emotional bond.
The effect goes beyond the fact that you put together your furniture. Sure, reading a manual and spending two hours sitting on the floor better be worth it. Considering the fear millenials have to making a family not many of us will get to have a stupid son, instead we’ll have a crooked chair and a wobbly dining room. We get it. But the effect is about the events surrounding the process.
We put stuff together all the time, and that doesn’t mean we get to fall in love with it. Otherwise we would all love our jobs. We love this furniture for bigger reasons.
We go to Ikea in times of change, full of expectation, probably after moving to a new place or with a new partner, to a new city. You walk through the exposition and get to project yourself living around all that stuff because they actually build room samples for you to wonder if this crappy and inexpensive bed is right for you. And you picture yourself actually living there. In your head that bed is the bed where you’ll conceive your children, eat breakfast with your loved one while you catch up with your series in Netflix. Then you wake up and realize there’s another dude waiting to jump on your bed to do the exact same thing.
And then there’s teamwork. When the chips are down and you unpacked all the pieces, you sit down trying to accomplish something as boring and meaningless as putting together a lamp. But there you are, learning new things, in a new life experience with your friends, or by yourself. Who would’ve known that the small boy from the hood was going to be making a path of his own in this brave new world? (the answer is: no one cared to ask that question) Either way you’re pumped up piecing together a more comfortable future.
Sure, everyone’s going to have the same ugly wobbly dining room. But it sure as hell it’s not your ugly wobbly dining room. You built it, it’s yours.
It’s yours because you walked through hours and hours before making up your mind with the most reasonably priced option and you carried those heavy boxes to the parking lot where you paid a Latin American immigrant half of what Ikea was trying to charge you to take your stuff home. Then you sat in your bedroom floor knowing you wouldn’t sleep until you were done because that’s precisely why you bought that bed for; you had no place to sleep.
Likely you slept over the matress half way through the night among nuts, bolts and screwdrivers. You woke up, finished your business and put your new life in motion. This bed is not an artifact for stamina recovery, it’s a symbol of your persevearance and independence. The bed is your stupid son, and you’ll spend many nights together (this is a terrible metaphor).
Yes, your furniture is unique, just like everyone else’s.
Originally published at www.invisiblebridg.es.
