Desperately seeking shoe rack: why IKEA’s shelves are bare – The Economist

by Miranda Purves, Alison Roman
This story is part of a series by 1843 magazine on the ongoing shortages caused by pandemic-related supply chain glitches. Read about everything from dognapping and bikes to video games and fake tan.
It’s August 2020 and I’m standing at the IKEA information kiosk in the Etobicoke store in Toronto, having a heated argument with a salesperson who won’t sell me the floor-model of Mackapär, a white shoe rack. It’s only fair! It said online they were in stock. It’s impossible that someone has all the remaining Mackapär in their cart, I got here when the doors opened!
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I grabbed the shoe rack from the hands of the man in the yellow-and-blue striped polo shirt and debated running down the wide self-checkout aisles, through the automatic doors and into my waiting hatchback. My only other option – escalating the fight with the employee – posed an even greater risk than arrest for a middle-aged white woman in America. Someone in the long line behind us would have been delighted to video the scene and post me screaming, “Get your supervisor!” on the Karen subreddit. Or is there already an r/Karën?
Yes, it’s hard to write about IKEA without making umlaut jokes, but that facile humour belies the embarrassing truth. My relationship with the chain is deep, long-standing and, as the pandemic has forced me to acknowledge, sadomasochistic.
The Dutch-based, Swedish-born company is dealing with a pandemic hangover: a 16% fall in profit between August 2020 and August 2021. I’m coming to terms with my own pandemic hangover in the form of an existential question that haunts me like a stripped hex screw – had I mastered IKEA, or had IKEA mastered me?
Though I pride myself on my auction, Craigslist and Kijiji shopping agility, IKEA has played a part in every key transition in my life. When I was 13 and allowed to decorate my own room, with prescience I juxtaposed cottage-core Laura Ashley wallpaper, antiques and contemporary white IKEA veneer. Thirty-five years later I bought a modest brick semi-detached house in Toronto and designed my first IKEA kitchen. (The cabinet- and drawer-fronts painted up beautifully in Farrow & Ball “Skylight”.) That’s why I needed Mackapär. Eleven months of the year I rent the Toronto house out furnished so that, come August, I can pretend that my family and I still live there.
Just as I juggle two countries, I maintain two IKEAs, the one in Etobicoke and another in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The latter’s cafeteria has a fantastic view of the Statue of Liberty, the former of the freeway, which looks quite cool framed by the oversized windows. This isn’t an aside. What keeps mass-consumer allergics like me coming back are these little appeals to humanity. An hour shopping for headphones at Best Buy can crush you for a week, whereas IKEA lets you build your spirit back up again with a lingonberry juice and soothing vista.
Although the monolithic furniture retailer is obviously in it for profit, the vaguely socialist promise behind IKEA’s “democratic design principles” (form, function, sustainability, quality and low price) typically translates into offering the nicest version of a thing that can be made affordably. Any design snob could tell you that. (The shoe racks I found at furniture e-tailers were ugly and depressing, but Mackapär is cheerful and pretty.)
Despite IKEA’s relative virtue, my friends and I treat the store as a shameful concession, a stopgap on the way to realising our slow decorating dreams. “Jane! Your deck looks amazing! Where’d you get your patio cushions?!” Eyeroll. “I finally just went to IKEA. I don’t need to spend $200 per cushion for the deck, and these are actually fine.”
Even as we have scorned the place, we’ve all prided ourselves on knowing how and when to use it. IKEA tap? Never. IKEA range hood? Yes. I had such a sense of control over the calmly evolving inventory that I was in denial about how much I relied on the store to keep my daily life going.
When any denial loses its cover, it’s painful. Mine was shattered during lockdown in spring 2020. My family of four were stuck together in our Brooklyn row house listening to non-stop sirens. The misery for me, though, was peppered with moments of ecstasy in the backyard away from the Ingrates (as I’d named the others), where I marvelled at the variegated greens unfurling into the clear – clear – air.
I just needed a few more seating options to take advantage of my newly relevant yard. After Craigslist, Etsy, eBay, Apartment Deco and random vintage websites didn’t bear fruit I turned, as usual, to the IKEA website.
The interface was a kind of palimpsest, old and new IKEA rudely smashed together. You could put items in your cart, but couldn’t check out. A message flicked at worker safety. Dates and times were all fugacious. The phone lines disconnected, or had recorded voices with mixed messages.
“IKEA”, I gasp-shouted to the disinterested Ingrates, “IS BROKEN.”
At the time, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about the mess, revealing that this multibillion-euro global corporation simply hadn’t bothered to develop a strong online sales infrastructure. It also seemed to have a shamefully small IT staff. The click-and-collect was mass chaos. It billed credit cards with no plans in place as to how to get the products out.
I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Witnessing this unmapped faultline open in the neutral meadow where we consumer cows had peacefully grazed made me feel what I’d previously registered only numbly: the world was falling apart. The etched leaves in my garden took on a menacing cast, once I knew that I wouldn’t be able to enjoy them from a Bondholmen loveseat. Then it kept getting hotter, the mosquitoes came, our local park was invaded by jostling, masked, accusatory, possibly contagious zombies.
A year after the first attempt, I tried and failed to get Mackapär in Red Hook, then again in Etobicoke this August. But why was I even there for the third time (OK, fifth)? My family – and my tenants – could throw their shoes in a heap. I was so brainwashed by decades of rushing through the showroom floor that not having inoffensive, if ubiquitous, shelving systems in the foyer and laundry room seemed inconceivable. Now that I couldn’t get those systems, I was under IKEA’s thumb.
A tense moment at my sister-in-law’s new cottage confirmed my changed relationship with the shop. Noticing her beds, I commented, “Oh, you got Bergpalm in pink and brown?” This tasteful, striped cotton duvet cover is a perfect example of what IKEA does so well. When I looked, I couldn’t find a single one in that colour scheme.
“I raced through and grabbed everything good,” my sister-in-law said. She probably didn’t mean it, but in my fevered scarcity mindset, it almost sounded like she was criticising my shopping prowess. And was it weird that she hadn’t invited me to go to the store with her?
Like all affairs where the power balance shifts, IKEA was making me paranoid, needy, grasping. I wanted to talk to someone in upper management and had a brief, naive image of an honest chat with the chief executive, or even with one of the three sons of Ingvar Kamprad, IKEA’s founder.
I wasn’t going to ask any hardball questions such as whether its complex ownership model was a tax-evasion strategy. Or if its claims to sustainability were rendered meaningless by manufacturing and selling furniture as inexpensively as possible. I just wanted to know what some of the conversations were when the company had to shut all the stores. Was everyone freaking out?
The IKEA press office wouldn’t facilitate an interview. Instead it sent a statement assuring me that, among other things, “Our Customer Service offerings have been expanded so that we can answer all questions and continue to prioritise the safety of both our employees and our customers.” What is a customer service offering? You can now have that but “we have no idea when” served with a Swedish meatball?
To give credit, Andrea, my correspondent in the press office, apparently noticed that the official response had ignored my question about Mackapär. “Our MACKAPÄR shoe rack is quite popular,” she wrote. “It is available in a lot of our IKEA stores across the US at the moment.” So I checked the website again. Sure enough, there was the little green dot next to “in store in Brooklyn”.
It has 70 reviews and a five-star rating. This makes me uneasy, like texting someone who might not text me back. Can I wait, and get it when I’m in Toronto next, or will it be gone again?
I want to turn my back on IKEA, which has finally awoken from its long PR nap and now admitted what its customers already knew: that it was struggling to keep its shelves stocked and its phones answered. The problems would continue well into 2022 and oh, they’ll be raising prices.
This is a good opportunity to put my money where my mouth is when it comes to globalised disposable consumerism. Though IKEA’s furniture isn’t all that disposable – the Ivar shelves in my office are an expansion, using an ingenious corner shape, of the basic shelf I got off Craigslist 15 years ago.
Listen to me, rationalising, as a good co-dependent will do. It’s both beautiful and disturbing that IKEA has had such a consistent role as a peripheral player in our lives that it forms our centres – a marketer’s dream come true. This mirrors the experience of the pandemic, which, at least briefly, shifted the ground beneath essential and marginal.
For some of us, the pandemic opened up a wellspring of hope for real change, along with self-examination. For me, it was the breaking of IKEA that forced me to assess whether I could really handle dismantling capitalism as we know it. Was I just a phoney who could afford to hold my au courant views because they’ll never be more than castles in the air (furnished by faux DIY flat-pack furniture)?
I don’t know. But I haven’t gone to pick up Mackapär…yet.
Miranda Purves is a writer who lives in Brooklyn
When I was 15 I became a vegetarian (part of a longer story involving coming home to a kitchen smelling of freshly charred-in-a-bad-way ground turkey patties). In all honesty, I didn’t miss meat much. I supplemented my former life as a steak and pork taco-loving Californian with lots of vegetables and Jack-in-the-Box tacos that I was told were made of soy (they were not, in fact).
One evening a few years later, I went to my best friend’s home for dinner. Her mom was making her famous (to me) chicken wings – sticky, salty, sweet, fall-apart-slow-roasted in a sauce made of soy sauce, brown sugar and so much garlic. When I walked in, the smell alone determined that would be my last day as a practising vegetarian.
All that is to say: I really, really love chicken. The way the skin melts into gorgeous golden drippings in which to roast potatoes and plump cloves of garlic. The simultaneously crispy exterior and juicy interior of an expertly fried breast. The tender bits of shredded thigh that have been braised in a white-wine laced broth I’d like to drink. Those sticky sweet wings! I still dream of them.
What other protein can be so readily transformed, can shine among so many different flavour profiles? Try as I might not to play favourites, in my heart I know that nothing compares, no stand-in comes close.
Sure, we’ve made strides switching out our red meat with plant-based options, slipping a pea- or soy-based patty between our potato rolls with little or no sacrifice in flavour or texture. But there simply isn’t yet a satisfying replica for chicken. Which is why poultry shortages in Britain this year – caused by a scarcity of farm- and factory-workers, among other pandemic and Brexit related breakdowns – struck fear in so many hearts (especially when Nandos, a popular chicken joint, ran out of its popular peri-peri dish).
Yet still, we must eat. While we dream of chicken, here are some replacement options for some of my favourite chicken dishes – minus the bird. Though the texture and flavour will be forever unmatched, come dinner time, these alternatives should still thrill.
Chickpea noodle soup
Are chickpeas a suitable substitution for chicken? Not always. But simmered in an olive oil slicked vegetable broth alongside celery, toasted garlic and plenty of leeks, finished with a handful of cooked noodles (fusilli for me, please), a smattering of freshly chopped herbs like parsley and chive, plus a quick shave of parmesan cheese for good measure, they just might heal you like the original. Dried chickpeas take longer but give you a decidedly more delicious broth – canned will work if you’re short on time.
Mushroom pot pie
There is no version of chicken pot pie that tastes as good as one made with, well, chicken. But here we are. Mushrooms, with their incomparably meaty texture, deep savoury flavour and wild abundance make them an excellent candidate for your next pie, something that I’d eat every single day from the start of Daylight Saving to Memorial Day.
Cook your mushrooms with thinly sliced onion like you would chicken thighs: in olive oil and butter in a cast-iron pan, followed by a dusting of flour for a quick roux. Add a bit of vegetable broth and soy sauce to make a thick gravy from the scrapings in the pan. Maybe throw in a few sprigs of thyme or chopped fresh parsley and plenty of black pepper. Top with a pie crust or shop-bought puff pastry, brush with egg wash and bake until puffed, bubbling and golden brown.
Crispy eggplant schnitzel
For most of my life I was unaware that there was a chicken version of eggplant parmesan. Despite knowing it exists, I have no reason to choose it over what I declare to be the superior version: eggplant. This is less a new idea and more a reminder that eggplant, when breaded and fried (or simply roasted with a ton of olive oil and plenty of salt and pepper until deeply browned and crisped at the edges), is a ringer for your thin cutlet-style chicken preparations – including a schnitzel-esque style dish.
Brush the eggplant with a light egg wash and press it into salted panko bread crumbs. Pan fry in a healthy glug of olive oil and finish with some capers popped in brown butter, followed by a healthy squeeze of lemon.
Alison Roman is a writer and cookbook author who lives in Brooklyn
ILLUSTRATIONS: MARI FOUZ
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