| East Bay Express July 18, 2001 Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 By Jennifer Barrios Germany figures into IKEA history in another way as well; Kamprad was an early Nazi sympathizer. Still, IKEA's gleam has not been tarnished by this news. Even protests against IKEA's use of subcontractors who utilize child labor in making their products have not seemed to have made the company's image makers' jobs much harder. A 1998 book, Leading by Design: The IKEA Story, written by Swedish author Bertil Torekull, compares Ingvar Kamprad to, alternately, Jesus and the Pope. Torekull forgives Kamprad for his youthful, fascist transgressions by, in part, blaming Kamprad's grandmother for pressing movement literature on him at a young age. (The epigraph heading the chapter acquitting the demigod Kamprad is, fittingly, a quote from Psalms: "Remember not the sins of my youth.") As for child labor: "The problem is more a matter of development for the country in question than for us," says one of Kamprad's three sons in the book (as a condition of the interview, Torekull agreed not to divulge which son said what). "We do not want child labor, but why does it exist at all? It's not enough to say that we don't want it. We must also ask the question of what happens to the children if we abandon an order. Are they to go back to selling themselves on the streets instead?" After touring the showroom and making a quick stop at the in-house restaurant -- where arugula graces the salad plates -- and the strategically placed bathrooms (Torekull's book lets the reader in on another Kampradism: "a full bladder must not be what decides the customer on buying or not buying something"), you continue down the stairs. Here's where the smaller pieces are -- the rugs, the kitchenware, the curtain rods. After that is the self-serve furniture area, a large, traditional warehouse with rows and rows of sky-high shelves full of identical cardboard boxes. The vital price tag information comes into play here to guide you to the proper row and column where the furniture is located. Once there, you must maneuver the heavy boxes onto your cart, and hope that all the parts are contained within. (If not, expect some heavy delays, as IKEA's policy on missing parts is to ship them to the customer.) So far, all of this is working smoothly. Every night, ten semi trucks loaded with chairs, tables, and mattresses arrive from IKEA's warehouses in Southern California; it takes the entire night to restock the displays and warehouse. O'Rourke is clearly proud of what IKEA East Bay has wrought. "The biggest challenge we have," he calls down to me as we walk up the stilled escalator, "is that the store itself was dimensioned for a much smaller volume than what we're dealing with now." It's true. When IKEA East Bay first opened in April 2000, a veritable tent city of people was waiting outside, each hoping to be one of the first one hundred to enter the store (the prize for that coveted position was a free Poäng chair). Since then, the store has been handling two and a half times the number of people it had originally projected. At that rate, even the new parking garage won't be spacious enough to meet the demand. O'Rourke stops short of revealing exact attendance figures for IKEA East Bay. "Oh yeah, we keep count," he says. "We are very proud of the numbers that we do in the store, but I have to be equally concerned about what my competition wants to find out [about] what I'm doing." | ||
