Burbank Buried in Fields of Sofas
Jaime Berg said her wallet was vibrating. “It’s sending me signals!” she said. “It’s telling me to spend, spend, spend!”
Berg was one of the thousands of shoppers drawn to IKEA, the newly opened furniture phenom of Burbank that had for weeks been bombarding the Los Angeles area with advertisements.
Berg, an MBA candidate at UCLA, was not the only one heeding the call at opening day-plus-one at IKEA, a mega-store with enough retail show space of Swedish-designed home adornments to fill six football fields. The crowd was so big that arriving cars had to be guided down cone-lined byways by police officers and security guards, just as at a Dodger game. IKEA officials say about 20,000 people visited the store on its second day.
On opening day itself, which was already the stuff of urban legend, more than 27,000 had come through the doors.
“People were crazy,” said Christina Stadlman, who stood outside at a food stand making Swedish pancakes for shoppers. She and other Swedish-themed businesses were situated under a large blue-and-white tent that had been erected for opening week.
“They were lined up so far back that some of them had to wait two hours in the sun just to get inside the store,” she said, serving up a fruit-smothered pancake.
By day two, those who simply wanted to be part of retail history had cleared out. The real shoppers, such as Berg, had arrived.
“When we came up the stairs it was just like a movie,” Berg said of her first view of the 240,000 square feet of sales space.
“Like ‘2001,’ ” added a friend, Kevin Dadian, visiting from San Francisco.
Dadian looked around at the throngs passing through displays of furniture and said, without a hint of irony, “What better way could there be to spend my vacation?”
Not everyone shared his sentiments. Nearby, two Burbank men named Jimmy and Jay were sitting on a Kabusa leather sofa.
“We have to buy a sofa so we can stop sitting on the floor, and we came here because I thought we could get a good price,” said Jimmy, who had the vacant stare of a man who has seen too much furniture in one day. “The trouble is, I don’t have any taste. None at all.”
As the two men spoke, they became aware that people were passing through the model room, staring at them as if they were part of a display of typical American roommates trying to furnish their first apartment.
“This is weird,” Jay said. They moved on.
Nearby, in an area decorated with dark furniture and metal accessories, were Mark Gottlieb and his mother, Myrna.
Mark sat on the Liaterp sofa bed and said, “I just got to get one of these.”
Mark lifted the Hasvik stereo rack and said, “I just got to get one of these.”
Myrna looked into the Bjorn mirror and said, “I just got to get my hair done.”
Ric Alonso and Ernie Koneck of Sherman Oaks knew exactly what they wanted. “The $98 sofa is what we’re here for,” Alonso said, striding purposefully. “Now if we could only find it.”
Getting lost in the labyrinth of model rooms featuring everything from inexpensive fabric-and-foam sofas to a $1,995 water buffalo-hide corner unit, seemed to be an obligatory part of the IKEA experience. The most often heard question was, “How do we get out of here?”
“They ought to be passing out road maps,” said Marvin Youngerman, who owns a bicycle shop in West Hills. “I’ve never seen a place like this. Now I’m seeing and I don’t believe it.”
In the meantime, Alonso and Koneck had found the $98 fold-out teal-colored sofa called Aspvik. They stood before it, clearly disappointed.
“We are not getting this sofa,” Alonso said in no uncertain terms. “It looked better in the ad.”
Activity was even more frenetic on the first floor where, free of the constraints of the model rooms, shoppers could load up on rare tchotchkes.
“Isn’t this adorable?” said Berg, as she loaded a three-foot-high black plaster cat into her cart. Her friend Dadian brought over a bag of 100 small candles, on sale for $6.
Berg looked accusingly at the other two bags of candles Dadian had already bought.
“At this price, how can I help it?” Dadian said, defensively.
“We’re going to have to start having rituals,” Berg said.
Mark Gottlieb was heading for the checkout with only a hanging lamp in his cart. “All this talk about Sweden,” he said, “and most of this stuff is made in Taiwan or some other country in Asia.”
He displayed a little stuffed rabbit. The label said it was made in South Korea.
Outside, the sun was setting on the Burbank IKEA. It was presumably rising on some of IKEA’s other 87 stores in 21 countries. Into the parking structure pulled a woman with two little boys who burst out of the car.
One, about 5, ran toward the store, then came to a stop, wide-eyed.
It was not the store that froze him in his tracks. He pointed toward the striped tent.
“Look mommy,” he said reverently. “A circus.”
