I’m sure this warning is no great surprise to anyone, but I bet you think it’s because IKEA makes junk that goes into the garbage pretty quickly.<\/p>\n
Well, partly that. But mostly because of what I learned about IKEA’s tyrant-founder, Ingvar Kamprad, in Lauren Collins’s October 3 article, “House Perfect,” in The New Yorker<\/em>:<\/p>\n IKEA constitutes a sort of borderless nation-state, with seats of power, redoubts of conservatism, second cities, imperial outposts, creative hubs, and administrative backwaters …<\/em><\/p>\n “IKEA at its worst is like a sect,” Goran Carstedt, a former head of IKEA North America, once said … [E]mployees parse Kamprad’s frequent handwritten faxes as if they were pages from the Talmud … The atmosphere at IKEA reminded me of that of a political campaign, with true believers, whispering skeptics, inside jokes, and deflection of even the most innocuous questions. A former senior executive told me that, although he still admired the company, he had found it suffocating. He said, “For me, it was like North Korea.”<\/em><\/p>\n Sounds like Scientology, huh? That reference to the Talmud is most unfortunate because the IKEA story gets worse:<\/p>\n IKEA is not really a Swedish company. It is controlled by a company called INGKA Holding, which, in turn, is controlled by [a Dutch] tax-exempt, nonprofit foundation\u2014to which Ingvar Kamprad transferred his ownership shares in 1982 … “Few tasks are more exasperating than trying to assemble flat-pack furniture from IKEA,” The Economist wrote in 2006. “But even that is simple compared with piecing together the accounts of the world’s largest home-furnishing retailer …” Kamprad has been a tax exile since the nineteen-seventies <\/em>… A bigger blow to Kamprad’s reputation came in 1994, when the Swedish newspaper <\/em>Expressen published evidence revealing that Kamprad had once been active in the Swedish Nazi movement … In 1948, Kamprad paid to publish a book of [the leader of the Neo-Swedish (Nazi) movement]’s political writings. In 1950, he invited [this Neo-Nazi] to his wedding, writing that he was proud to be a part of the Neo-Swedish circle …<\/em><\/p>\n In 2009, Sweden’s largest television station, SVT, revealed that IKEA’s money … does not actually go to a charitable foundation in Holland, as IKEA had led people to believe. Rather… Inter IKEA is owned by a foundation in Liechtenstein, called Interogo, a corporate rainy-day fund. Interogo, which has amassed twelve billion dollars, is controlled by the Kamprad family.<\/em><\/p>\n To summarize: The founder and owner of IKEA is a monstrously wealthy neo-Nazi and a massive tax cheat.<\/p>\n Let’s keep our money out of IKEA, even as we join the Occupy Wall Street protesters.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m sure this warning is no great surprise to anyone, but I bet you think it’s because IKEA makes junk that goes into the garbage pretty quickly. Well, partly that. But mostly because of what I learned about IKEA’s tyrant-founder, … Continue reading
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