What I Did On My Holiday by BEVIS

Okay, so it wasn't really a holiday, but I had a good day off yesterday anyway.

Ikea was having a sale on this item:




(Contents not included.)

The sale started at 10am yesterday, and Wifey in particular has been going INSANE with all my Muppet busts and figurines sitting around the house (on display but getting in her way and understandably spoiling her interior decoration), so we both had our hearts set on buying a few of these cabinets.

Of the 20 Muppet Busts available, I now have 18 (as of Christmas). These are the two I am yet to obtain:





After leaving the house at 9:15am and arriving at Ikea half an hour later, we realised that our fear of a crowd lining up at the doors was not unjustified. In fact, we ended up being pretty much at the front of the queue that formed behind us. It was over eighty people lining up. And as it turned out, they were all there for these cabinets.

Why? Well, they usually retail for $179, but were going on sale for just $99 - a reasonable saving by anyone's standards. And they look great. However, there was a limit of two per customer, and Wifey and I wanted to get four (I have a lot of Muppet stuff to get out of the way). So we both needed to go in there and get two each. Hence the day off work (any excuse, at this point - with only a couple of weeks to go).

At 9:58am (I was watching), they opened the doors and the crowd went nuts. Mad scrambling and running and pushing (I'd never seen this kind of crazy shopping behaviour in real life before) ensued. Amusingly, in Ikea you're forced to follow the one pathway around the entire store, so the running mass of people snaked its way through the whole store, looking for the cabinet section.

Naturally, I reached the cabinet in question first. (YAY!) However, there were only three display models there, and they still had the $179 price tag. (Auuggh!) As the crowd swarmed around me and the three cabinets, hands groped everywhere for a little tag with a barcode on it or something that would 'bags' or 'reserve' a cabinet for the person holding it. But there were none of those either.

A passing Ikea staff member casually informed us that we needed to head downstairs to the 'self-serve' section of the store (pretty much their warehouse area, just before the cashiers). This meant that the entire crowd was roughly two floors and half a store's snake-like jog away from where these coveted cabinets lay in wait.

So the crazy running crowd took off again, through mock bathrooms, kitchens and bedrooms, through fake livingrooms and down stairwells. When we emerged in the self-serve area, we immediately saw a larger crowd of about 100 people swarming over several skips of disassembled cabinets in boxes. There were trolleys everywhere. People were calling out to their partners to come in and "take this one, I'm going back for another!" Somehow, these people had found out (or already knew, most likely) precisely where they needed to be and had lined up at the door two floors down from where we'd been queueing. How amusing for them.

Old people were being side-stepped by younger, more agile shoppers who knew exactly what they were doing.

Wifey hung back with a trolley while I moved in for the kill. There was no way we were going to miss out on these damn cabinets. We'd actually had our eyes on this exact cabinet since August, when my parents came down for my birthday and we went shopping together for house stuff. We couldn't afford 4 x $179 at the time, but when we saw (in early January) that Ikea would be putting them on sale on 31st January for $80 off, we wrote it on our diary and both made sure that we could get out of work on the day. So I admit that I was just as desperate to get my hands on the things as everyone else there obviously was. And when you're in a 'mob', the mob mentality can easily take over.

However, the red haze faded from my eyes when I saw a woman whose trolley was pushed out of the way while she was picking up one of the boxes. The man standing behind her grabbed her trolley while her back was turned and rolled it behind him so he could get past, and then the woman behind him took it and did the same thing.

I watched as the poor woman's trolley was pushed further and further to the back of the pack of struggling bodies, while the woman in question was blissfully unaware of what was transpiring behind her. When she finally got a grip on the (incredibly heavy, it turned out) box and turned back to where her trolley had been only moments before, she saw that it was missing and asked the crowd somewhat desperately: "Has anyone seen the trolley that was just here?"

Everyone ignored her.

And that's when I had my Moment of Clarity (TM).

I spun my head around and took in the number of people milling about, all anxious to work their way into the middle of the scrum and get their hands on these darn cabinets. There were fewer than 200 people. Most of them were there in pairs. I knew that even if they all wanted to get two cabinets per person (as Wifey and I intended to do), that would still mean 400 cabinets tops (even allowing for the odd rule-breaker who'd try to buy more than their allotted two-cabinets-per-customer).

My eyes scanned what I could see of the pile of boxes we were all standing around. There appeared to be eight piles of them, and each was about ten boxes high. That made at least 80. Then I saw an Ikea staff member standing on the opposite side of the crowd, trying not to look on in horror at the disgusting display of greed and selfishness unraveling before him (of which I was a part).

He was standing behind a dolly, which was carrying another two piles of boxes, ready to be added to the mix. And behind him was a whole wall of boxes. There was no need for this kind of crazy behaviour. There were at least another 500 cabinets stacked up against the far wall, waiting to be put out on the floor.

I don't know why an Ikea staff member didn't dispel the crowd's manic behaviour by telling us there were so many there (Wifey later heard a report that they actually had thousands in stock), but maybe it's because stupid people will do stupid things if they don't think they're going to get what they want. Why get involved and maybe lose an eye for your troubles? The poor guy's only getting paid $8 an hour.

So anyway, back to my Moment of Clarity (TM). An epiphany, you might say (although it probably wasn't that impressive). I suddenly understood that we weren't going to miss out on getting our precious cabinets, and the only thing hurrying would do was get us further ahead in the already-rapidly-forming queues down at the cash registers to our far right. But Wifey and I had the whole day set aside for this one activity, so standing in a check-out queue wasn't a concern to us. In the meantime, the Lord of the Flies carryings-on I was witnessing right in front of me was making me feel ashamed for running through the store with everyone else just minutes before (although at the time it felt like a fun adventure). Once we'd reached the second crowd with all the boxed cabinets, things had taken a turn for the worse.

I left my spot in the bussling crowd and walked back to get the woman's errant trolley for her. As I approached her (still struggling with her box), I said, "Here it is," and helped her lift her box onto the thing. Boy, was it ever heavy! I didn't realise so seemingly-flimsy a cabinet could have so much weight to it! Not wanting to have to pick up four of those for myself, I waited until the woman looked back at the crowd before I took off with her trolley and cabinet. Wifey laughed and cheered my ingenuity.

NOT REALLY!!

After I helped the woman load the box onto her trolley, she thanked me and I said "No problem." Then I walked around to the other side of the crowd (where - for some bizarre reason - there was a big gap in the bodies fighting their way into the boxes. I started to pull a box off the nearest pile (much more casually this time, as the sense of urgency didn't matter anymore), and suddenly Wifey (thinking strategically, of course) was behind me with our trolley. As I lifted the first box (my back's still aching), I heard an old man struggling with a cabinet to my left. Once Wifey had the trolley stable (the surprisingly-massive weight of the cabinets was making some trolleys tip over if the weight wasn't evenly-distributed), I assisted the old guy to load two more boxes on top of the two he already had. His elderly wife thanked me for my help.

Wifey and I stood by for a minute while I caught my breath. We just watched and waited as the swarm died down and the Ikea staff members kept replacing the diminishing piles of boxes with new crates stacked high with the blessed things, from excess stock that was waiting against the side wall.

When almost everyone had left the area, Wifey and I returned to the now-ravished piles of boxes and took our other three boxes. With a trolley of two boxes each, we joined two separate-but-very-long queues and stood patiently in line.

Unfortunately, our selfish and angry fellow shoppers weren't done with their disgraceful behaviour just yet. Queue jumping, arguing and running to a newly-opened register like the devil was on their heels still continued. Thankfully Wifey and I were both served remarkably quickly (Wifey even got a free cookie from a quick-thinking Ikea staff member who walked around with a plate of the things to quell the storm - but the darn woman didn't come anywhere near me!), so we were outta there and loading up our poor little car fairly soon afterwards.

Then it was a tentative drive home (Would my car's tyres take the weight? Answer: Yes, but only just), a hefty unloading procedure for the two of us, and then frustrations galore as we followed the little smiling stick figures in the illustrated instructions to put one of the cabinets together. I didn't want to put more than one together just now, so currently our dining room has a big, impressive-looking glass cabinet in the corner, which contains:




The rest of my Muppets stuff will go in the other three cabinets, once I've put them together.

Wifey told me in the car on the way home from Ikea that she was very proud of me for stopping to help those other people in the store. I just blushed.

See? I'm like Superman.


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