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The semiotics of the IKEA meatballs

And so to Warrington, possibly with a little less vim than the occasion demands. 

Truth to tell, the prospect of a trip to IKEA doesn't make my heart sing with joy. It's not the ships themselves, ruthlessly calculated flowcharts of attainable lifestyle that they are, its more where they're located.

Ask me sometime and I will happily bore you to tears with my theories about retail parks being a key symptom of the atomisation of post-industrial society, thickets of giant soulless sheds which can only be driven to, cause and excuse for people to withdraw further from other people as they exist solely as consumers in an increasingly automated retail experience. 

But I'll leave going on about that too much right now, as I haven't even had breakfast yet, so portents of the collapse of civilisation are perhaps too much too handle. I've also been up all night dealing with a faulty burglar alarm and am also perhaps a touch hungover, so my view of this experience, jaundiced at the best of times, is descending to dystopian. 

My companion is in a similar boat, possibly more so, having just navigated the maze of lights and junctions required to get you off the road and into the Gemini Retail Park, down the oddly named Europa Way and, to my disquiet, Charon Way (I wonder if the Warrington town planners of the nineteen eighties specifically intended to invoke ferryman who conveys souls to the Land of the Dead and conclude that they probably did), and so our first port of call is the caff. They rather grandly call it a restaurant, but to my mind, if you queue up holding a tray, it is not. The reasoning runs thus: we are both prone to making terrible decisions when hungry, so let us cease being hungry, whatever the cost to our sense of self-worth.

I'm always fascinated by the IKEA caff. Much like the shop its a model of efficiency, and, okay, while it's never going to win awards it does what it does effectively, that is, feed an unfeasible amount of people with a minimum of fuss. 

Part of the deeply unnecessary bravado and machismo around cheffing is your ability to "do numbers", to keep your shit together and feed a lot of people. Oof, one fifty tonight, two hundred tonight. Set against the thousands who file through the IKEA caff this all seems fairly silly. Okay, while it's stretching a point to call it cooking, they don't pretend to, it wears its artifice proudly, banks of combi-ovens sit behind the unflustered servers, chucking out batch after batch of meals for the unceasing stream of people, and the chef in me is still impressed by the numbers. 

As to the food itself it's...inoffensive. Not bad as such. The fruit and veg juice drink (I'm not going to do a joke about the names if things, the first thing anyone ever does when referring to IKEA is do a joke about the name of things, it's deeply tedious) is actually quite refreshing. Obviously I ordered the meatballs, because what else would you do? The other options were a veg biryani, a Mac and Cheese and Fish and Chips, all dishes quite close to my heart and ones that I cook to a standard far higher than this. 

I'm not emotionally invested in Swedish meatballs though, so can scoff the lot without being too biased. They're okay, the whole plate is a little bland, and I'm grateful for the dash of lingonberry jam to brighten things up a bit. Once more I wonder why I don't just carry a bottle of hot sauce with me at all times. But, crucially, they're not bad. I leave the table and I'm not hungry, I'm ready to take IKEA on.

This, I think, is what the whole set-up signifies. The company's identity is based around being inoffensive, while divesting large quantities of people of modest sums of money (though I note that their furniture is a lot pricier than it used to be, we, however, are here for glassware, which is still v cheap). The food reflects that, it's a cheap and seamless experience, and you end up fed and, if not exactly cheerleading, at least not ill-disposed toward the whole enterprise.

In the comforting mash and gravy of the IKEA meatball lunch we see the corporate identity writ large in carbs. Come in, get fed, get out, doesn't cost too much, feels quite pleasant (the dining room is very well thought out, cosy lighting in one section giving way to a larger, sunnier bit - whatever your mood there's a seating area to reflect it. We, feeling fragile, went mood lighting, well-played IKEA). The experience has clearly, like the store layout, been designed to usher you through with a minimum of hassle. It's easy, and we like easy.

Obviously, in the shop itself, we spend more than we intend. This thing has been machine-tooled in order that you do so, in a way it's quite magnificent.

I grab a couple of jars of herring on the way out. They're okay, you know.


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