I’ve developed what clinicians refer to as “Beth Baldwin Based IKEA Co-dependency.” If they don’t call it that yet, I’m certain that they will in the future. Like pretty much everything else, it’s surely a syndrome on the way to being pathologized and included in the DSM-V.

Beth’s busy with her glamorous life, her work, and an amazing artist residency at the Artisphere, so I’d feel really bad about guilting her into going with me to IKEA right now just to buy a chair. And an ottoman. And to eat meatballs. And to watch couples fight their larger relationship battles in crazy passive-aggressive power struggles in the dining room table showroom area. And to impulse buy small random kitchen objects, because these are the things you do at IKEA.

Except in my dreams. In my dreams you don’t just go to IKEA. You also live there.

In a recent dream, Beth and I owned an IKEA. We lived there in an amazing Penthouse on the roof. Other people lived there, but when I woke up I couldn’t remember who they were. I do remember that Husband had an amazing kitchen.

There were also a lot of adorable cats living in the store, kind of like this:

I looked it up. IKEAs are franchises. We could own our own IKEA.

I’m not sure why we’d want to.

Their crazy corporate structure is so mysterious even they don’t seem to understand it – I suspect many of the layers of the company are designed expressly to avoid paying taxes, not because they want to enable the franchising of their stores. That’s okay, I don’t really want to own an IKEA.

While I don’t want to own a large retail franchise, I do wish, as I mentioned earlier, to own a new chair. I don’t want any more big heavy club chairs. I don’t want to relocate the nice one in the living room up into my office, either. Where would my spiritual advisor, Roger, sit while we all watch cartoons? Nevertheless, I want something larger than the barrel chairs that currently inhabit my office.

“Beth’s busy, but I can buy a chair without her!” I told myself.

“How hard could this be?” I asked myself.

What I should have asked myself is, “How many kinds of stupid can one person be?”

The answer is many. Many kinds of stupid.

I always forget what a mess IKEA’s inventory system is. I don’t know how I can forget, after the incident 6 years ago wherein I wanted to buy 4 Billy Bookcases with 4 pairs of full-length glass doors, which devolved into a ridiculous series of trips to various stores, innumerable phone calls, and absurd arguments about which items were on the ground or in the air. Victory was almost ours, those bookcases were in our reach, when at the last moment our hopes were dashed when we were told that it turned out that the previous night a forklift operator at College Park lifted all of the glass doors on a forklift. And then dropped them. Not intentionally, one presumes, but at that point my levels of IKEA-based derangement were such that I would have believed anything.

To her credit, the sales associate actually got teary-eyed when she told me what had happened. Or she was a very good actor. Or IKEA’s inventory system had also just broken her and we got a front-row seat at her meltdown.

Still, hope springs eternal and I thought I could buy a chair and an ottoman without Beth-based supervision.

How far will I go to avoid going to IKEA without Beth? I went around to my neighbor’s homes and tried out all of their chairs from all of the most obvious retail options in the area until I was sure the IKEA chair was the one I wanted. It was over 100 degrees out, but trudging around my hilly neighborhood and imposing on various neighbors was less aggravating than going to IKEA. For me, anyway.

Satisfied with my choice, I attempted to order the items online.

“In stock!” The website claimed.

The website lies.

When I tried to place the order, I got a message that the items were out of stock. I was then directed to check the stock and reorder. Which I did, over several days, thinking this must be a glitch.

Finally, in exasperation, I called the College Park store. I was told they had 13 chairs, 10 white covers, and a lot of ottomans. I was told Woodbridge had 9 chairs. These were the numbers that were appearing online. I decided to drive to one of the stores, buy the chairs and then arrange delivery, risking all that impulse buying, not to mention the guilt of not having Beth with me.

Then, I had a moment of clarity and called the 800 number for home catalog orders. An associate took my order…and told me the chairs are out of stock…in the warehouse, and at both local stores.

These are big bulky chairs. People don’t put them in their carts and tool around the store with them while they decide whether to buy them or not. Inventory control ought to be fairly straight-forward. You have them, or you don’t.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who finds this annoying. I didn’t care enough to pay for the contents of the entire article, but the teaser alone confirmed a few things for me:

Like many warehouse operations, IKEA crams an awful lot of merchandise into its stores, with much of it dozens of feet in the air, accessible only via forklift.
Under the old system, the site would tell customers that an item was in-store when it was at that store, not differentiating between a product at a lower level and one at a higher level. The problem: Because IKEA safety procedures prohibit forklifts from being used when customers are in the store, customers would come in to purchase their reserved sofa or table, only to be told that it can’t be accessed and that they must return some other day.

There are actually a lot of things about IKEA that make me crazy. Their labor record and the allegations of spying on employees not being the least of them. Also, I’m afraid if we hang out in the dining room table showroom for too long, we’ll start to have relationship problems, and Beth and I don’t want to risk that!

Allegedly, my chair will arrive on July 27th. I’m not going to hold my breath.