Find-The-Exit

News flash: Police throughout Europe are hunting for an English-speaking "IKEA bomber" after explosions at four of the Swedish group's stores in four countries.

Oops, how about that. Someone with a grudge, obviously. Alerting police throughout Europe to the phenomenon of someone really fed up with something about IKEA. Was it their sales techniques? Their public relations? Their huge, hulking presence in the marketplace? Is this some nutcase of an anarchist who has it in for corporate interests?

Or could it be someone who simply detests the enterprise's signature. Its tinkly-precious insistence on free language lessons in naming its various consumable items that are so intrinsically nauseating by their perky cuteness. Those names do grate on one's sensibilities.

Perhaps they're insensitive to the idea that if people were interested in learning Swedish, they would go about it on their own.

There's a visceral feeling of deep annoyance at sweeping one of their large-page newspaper advertisements with the unwary eye and coming up against that agonizingly stupid nomenclature. Still, would that be reason enough for someone to have set bombs triggered by cellphones simultaneously in Lille, France, Eindhoven, Netherlands, and Ghent, Belgium?

Must be a conspiracy of pissed-off customers. Who may have had the original, never-to-be-repeated experience of wandering into an IKEA emporium, curious about what all the fuss relates to as a go-to shopping destination. Only to discover, when making an attempt to leave the premises that leaving isn't as easy as entering.

For the designer of these huge enterprises was obviously given the task of constructing a maze. One that was meant to entrap consumers. Wander about at your leisure, from department to department, looking at neat rows of shelves and items for sale. Feel you've seen enough and want to leave? Good luck, chum.

For those who wish to leave the premises must undergo a process to entitle them to exit. Arrows point the way, from aisle to aisle, and no short-cuts. Each corridor and goods-stocked aisle taking you to the next, then the next, until you've traversed all the footage of the interior and are permitted to finally reach the cash desks, and the exit doors.

This irritatingly diabolic scheme to ensure that customers wade through all the merchandise on display, geared to expose them to everything that a well-stocked store has for sale, and that a well-decored home should own, maximizing the company's opportunities for higher receipts once the cash has been reached, deserves an explosion of anger.