Virgins no more

Finally. Our status as never-been-to-IKEA people is over.

Lori and I made the trip out near the Portland Airport to what's gotta be the largest retail store in Oregon, if not the Northwest: IKEA. Driving up to this behemoth, you'd think it would be visible from space.

Inside, what can I say? In a word, overwhelming. And I'm sure I'm not the first to characterize it that way. Anyone who's been to one of these stores is familiar with the well thought-out design and the attention to seemingly every detail and concept.

A play area for the kids. Lockers you can rent for a quarter. Escalator and elevators. Fold-out maps to tell you where are. Banks of checkout stands. A restaurant, with the famous Swedish meatballs, and, oh, so much more. (Felt like a college dining commons.)

What took us there? We needed to buy kitchen curtains. Sounds simple enough. Measure the window, pick out a bar to fasten to the wall or ceiling, select a fabric and hang. But, no. IKEA has some other option where you can buy multi-track fixtures to slide multiple vertical panels of fabric back and forth, all of it requiring much more hardware than the first option. At one point, we just looked at each other and said, no thanks. Let's keep it simple.

Afterward, I asked Lori how she rated her IKEA experience. "Definitely a ten!" she responded. "Or maybe a nine, only because I didn't get to spend enough time."

Me? I'd say a 6 or 7. Everything was clean and well organized and, given that you have a retail space and a honkin' huge warehouse under the same roof, there's plenty of product. Prices are impressively low and the restaurant food was surprisingly good. But I left feeling like a grain of sand on the beach.

What you absolutely don't have is a feeling that you, as an individual customer, matter. You're just someone with a debit or credit card, racking up charges that fuel this amazing corporate goliath. Employees are friendly enough and helpful, but come on. They see thousands of customers every single day. How would they remember anyone as a familiar face, let alone know what their shopping habits and preferences are?

Being there made me think back to Thomas Friedman's book, "The World is Flat," in which he discusses globalization and cites Wal-Mart as a prototypical example of a multinational corporation that has figured out how to streamline costs and boost profits by using computer technology to maximize supply-chain efficiencies. Of course, there's a dark side as well, since Wal-Mart is notorious for questionable practices designed to hold down basic pay and insurance costs, often at the expense of the taxpayer.

Maybe the Wal-Mart comparison is unfair, but I couldn't help but think of it when I was in IKEA. Seemed to me the only flaw I saw during my two hours there was a small pile of wadded-up paper towels that had proven too much for the one receptacle in the men's room and had spilled onto the floor of the men's room.

No longer an IKEA virgin, I now "get" the cartoon below: