The miracle of Älmhult

The Guardian does an in-depth piece on IKEA.

It had never occurred to you, presumably, that you might want to hang up magazines in your bathroom. But Ikea had already decided that you would. And the brilliant but scary part is this: once you’ve seen a row of magazines hanging up in one of Ikea’s showroom bathrooms, each neatly suspended at 45 degrees from a Mållen clip, it takes a will of steel not to find the magazines in your own bathroom, now you come to think of it, almost offensively disorganised. And so you think about purchasing the Mullen clip. At which point another Ikea sales tactic kicks in: the clips only cost 90p for three – so cheap that it’s hardly worth not buying them, just in case, especially if you’ve travelled a long way to get to the store. (In internal documents, Ikea calls such products “hot dogs”, because they cost the same as or less than the frankfurters available after the checkout.)

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