Bigger and better

2km later the devotion of The Many is beginning to waver. Children who have been crying for the bathroom for 800 metres are ready to burst. Feet are beginning to ache and the repetition of primary colours like some sort of ever-spinning pinwheel is beginning to cause migraines. By the time innumerable cardboard boxes have been loaded onto trolleys and wheeled to cars, The Many wonder if they have the energy to brave the roads at all. It's beginning to grow dark, hours have disappeared, the IKEA-hang-over is an epidemic.

The Reputation of Our Company.

IKEA's devotees treat it like a religion. Lisa Aitkin and Olly Taylor of Host Advertising Agency, who were responsible for converting Australians to the brand describe the experience as a kid of revelation. 'We became total devotees. We loved the simple logic and concrete rationality that sits behind everything they do. How they flat pack everything so they can get the maximum amount of product per cubic metre and avoid 'shipping air' around the world. How they set their designers seemingly impossible challenged like 'create a full bedroom suite to cost no more than the monthly salary of the average family in Poland, the country with the lowest PCI in the EU'. How because they use robots to load their lorries, and robots don't need to see, IKEA minimizes costs by not lighting their huge distribution hubs. Being this buttoned down is essential when you are publishing a catalogue whose print run alone is 190 million. That's bigger than the bible.' And this kind of adoration is not limited to those employed by the furniture giant. Germans are IKEA's best customers (15% of all IKEA sales are German) and in 2009 a Hamburg theatre company staged an opera about IKEA, 'Wunder von Schweden' ('Miracle from Sweden'), a biography of the 'furniture messiah' set to Swedish folk tunes.

Although shopping in IKEA can be inefficient, and for many outright infuriating, The Many keep coming. Why? Because as well as being stylish and fun, IKEA products are inconceivably cheap. IKEA's 1943 goal, 'to allow people with limited means to furnish their houses like rich people,' has been met, and continues to be met year after year.

The Sydney-siders sitting in their living rooms at midnight on November second, armed with allen keys and surrounded by ripped cardboard, are not alone. There are others making the same trip all over the world. Fumbling with screws, sweating as they lift sofas through doors, constructing a perfect Swedish life of their own. IKEA marketers claim that in 2010 one in three new europeans was conceived on an IKEA bed. Australians might not match Europeans when it comes to IKEA mania, but as couples fall asleep on their brand new FJELLSEs, it doesn't seem far off.