CHAIN REACTION
Ikea, you kea, we all kea

The pot racks excited me most. When I grow up, I want to be an executive chef (as well as an astronaut), so I had visions of setting up an ultra-modern kitchen with expensive Calphalon pots hanging from the ceiling. The serendipitous pot racks would certainly come in handy. Unfortunately, as I was moving in, a neighbor knocked on my door. He was a friend of the previous tenant and had come to retrieve the pot racks. The vision of my executive-astronaut kitchen fizzled as my new neighbor unscrewed the pot racks from the ceiling and waltzed out the door. At least he left behind a lemon pound cake as a welcome-to-the-neighborhood gesture.

I didn’t want to give up my dream kitchen so easily. As I muddled around unpacking boxes, a single, epiphanic word came to me: IKEA. Yes, the nice people at Ikea, that giant warehouse of home furnishing, would surely have identical pot racks that I could purchase. Confident that I could salvage my dream, I braved Saturday afternoon traffic and headed to my local Ikea megastore.

Sure enough, I found my pot racks. And the identical shelves that the previous tenant had left behind. And the lighting fixtures. In fact, at Ikea I found about a hundred items of furniture and accessories that I’ve seen in dozens of other homes and apartments. Throngs of people were in Ikea that day buying stuff for their homes. As I looked at a particular futon, a fellow customer told me that both she and her friend had purchased the same one yesterday. I saw two couples buy the same kitchen garbage can, and about five people load into their carts the same framed print of a colorful abstract painting by Wassily Kandinsky. Presumably, all of these people will lug this stuff home, spend countless frustrating hours putting it all together with those little allen wrenches that Ikea gives you, and end up with houses and apartments that look, well, exactly the same.

Megastores and super-chains provide a host of products and services to the American consumer through economy of scale: they stock huge quantities of merchandise, corner the market, and sell for cheap. Supposedly, the guiding principal behind these retail giants is to offer consumers infinite choice at cut-rate prices. Yet the proliferation of megastores and super-chains only end up diluting choices. Want some furniture? Go to Ikea. Craving a cup of coffee? Head to Starbucks. Even though consumers certainly have other options, the market force that the big chains wield nearly make consumers forget that those options even exist: a barrage of advertising and a proliferation of retail outlets breed familiarity with the big brand names and their products, so consumers don’t need to expend any time or mental energy shopping around. In effect, the big chains have turned American consumers into shopping automatons.

There used to be something known as “American craftsmanship.” From furniture to food, American craftsmen ran small businesses producing a true variety of goods that had character. But megastores and super-chains like Ikea and Starbucks remove the mom-and-pop character from their products. The result is a bland sameness in what consumers buy. And because super-chains use their market power to sell products cheaper, the careful craftsmanship of that the mom-and-pop outfits gets squeezed out of the American marketplace. Worse, most consumers have forgotten that a cup of coffee from the local joint-—assuming the local joint hasn’t been put out of business—-probably tastes better than the bitter swill Starbucks sells.

The abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky, whose framed prints are apparently all the rage with Ikea shoppers, worried about the effects of sameness in art. In his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky argued that when art becomes too abstract it all starts to look alike. The result is that art degenerates to mere decoration. When megastores and super-chains degrade consumer choice, the material aspect of American society and culture similarly degenerates from a rich mosaic of craftsmanship to a bland landscape of indistinguishable sameness. What consumers buy every day—-from coffee to couches—-doesn’t need to be art. But here’s what the megastores and super-chains have taken from us: the chance to choose from simple products artfully crafted that add, not remove, character from our lives and surroundings.

I bought the pot racks at Ikea anyway. They fit perfectly with the holes that were already in my ceiling and were on sale to boot. A finely crafted wrought iron pot rack probably would have cost ten times as much. Which, I suppose, is the real allure that the big retail chains offer. Someday, I’ll have my executive-astronaut kitchen, complete with the finest of furnishings and accessories. Until then, the simple limitation of money keeps me shopping at Ikea. I just hope that when I can finally afford the finer things, the megastores and super-chains haven’t used their economic might to eliminate all the quality from the American marketplace.