An afternoon spent at IKEA is often a memorable way to pass a few hours and spend a lot of dollars. Is it also a little bit painful? Often! Yet, returning home from an IKEA store can be a real feel-good accomplishment. Why is that?

cute lil’ staged rooms

The beginning of an IKEA experience is navigating through the giant showroom, often by taking an escalator or elevator to the brightly-lit second floor from the parking area. To traverse an IKEA showroom is to be guided through a Scandinavian decor wonderland of compact storage solutions, cozy seating areas, and tables set for intimate dinner parties. Large furniture items are displayed and arranged alongside small everyday home items — creating filled-in, hyper-realistic, hyper-aesthetic physical simulations of homes.

It’s like peeking into people’s windows, but the people aren’t real.

You know how visiting friends’ curated and lived-in spaces can spark aspirations for your own home? Or how visiting a new city can generate ideas about what it must be like to live there? IKEA does that kinda thing for you — and good(?) news! Everything you see is available for purchase!

You may imagine yourself living in each of the perfect fake rooms, considering whether this shoe rack or that shelf system will truly help you get your shit together.

an immersive labyrinth

Shopping at IKEA is kinda like being immersed in a maze of household goods, but to be pedantic, it’s actually a labyrinth and not a maze.

Unlike a corn maze — meant to trick you with choices and make you feel a little slaphappy when you see the same pumpkin display for the third time in as many minutes — a labyrinth has a single, meandering path. Labyrinths wind you from start to end, without dead ends, loops, or backtracking. (It wouldn’t be very prudent if IKEA were full of couples arguing about which way to turn to escape, or whether they had already tried THAT way. There is probably enough couple-arguing as it is.)

Following a path without figuring out a maze puzzle means that walking a labyrinth can also calm your mind. Meditation labyrinths are a centuries-old way to ease anxiety and center thoughts by walking along tightly wound stone paths toward the center of a round pattern — often boosted by a serene location like a lush green garden with birdsong.

Here’s the thing. Even though an IKEA stroll is not gonna be meditative, following arrows along a main pathway releases customers’ mental burden of deciding which way to go. It frees us up to notice and inspire (and buy). And besides that, unless you take designated shortcuts, IKEA gets you to pretty much see everything they’re selling.

Along the way, section by section, part of the immersion customers feel is because only one section of the IKEA showroom is mainly visible at a time. With semi-walled-off rooms and apartment layouts, the physical immersion directs our attention and keeps us in the moment. (I liken this to Disney theme park design where ideally there are no sight lines of other themed areas from where you’re located. So, for example, you can feel like you’re on planet Batuu in the Star Wars land without seeing a giant Slinky Dog coaster just beyond the parked Millennium Falcon.) This differs from department stores with low displays that encourage customers to visually scan across the entire floor.

At the end of the showroom, the IKEA labyrinth leads customers by a simple, cost-effective food court for a quick meal or Swedish fika — where you can pick up meatballs (or plant balls) with lingonberry jam, or a coffee and apple cake. Offering food is a great way to keep customers in the store longer (same for the kids’ play area). But also, this is a fun moment! A nice break! And, you can fuel yourself with food, hydration, and caffeine for the final push. (You might need it.)

putting it all together: the IKEA effect

From the showroom, customers continue along the designated pathway down an escalator or elevator, through sections of smaller items organized like a traditional retailer. On this floor, you might pick up a welcome mat, houseplant, or set of knives. You might feel inspired by the showroom layouts that ignited an aspiration to transform yourself into a more organized ~you~. And everything is so cheap, especially compared to all the big-ticket items you already ogled. (There’s an example of price anchoring for you. A little treat for the marketing bros.) You can fill a cart with cute practical things to incrementally improve your home, and not feel too pained!

Finally, if you’re grabbing any large furniture items, you get to play the warehouse game. Grab a big wheelie cart and find your flat-pack boxes of items in their numbered rows. This is where things get… less fun.

But the whole end-to-end experience — discovering chosen items in the showroom, locating the right boxes in the warehouse, and later assembling the pieces at home — culminates in what is known as the IKEA effect. The IKEA effect posits that we develop a higher emotional attachment to a piece of furniture if we’ve “built” it. I think this effect actually goes beyond that last stage of furniture assembly and includes the memory of the whole IKEA day.

It also reminds me of the Betty Crocker cake mix legend (and honestly, I don’t know if it’s true). Supposedly, a bunch of 1950s market researchers learned that if the boxed cake mix required a housewife to crack a few eggs into it, it helped her feel less guilty about the convenience. Of course, including powdered egg in the mix would actually be easier, but the tiny extra effort has a positive psychological effect: it helped people feel more like they really made the cake themselves. Or it might be that fresh eggs really just made better cakes. But either way, the idea is true that adding a little bit of friction can sometimes increase overall happiness with a product.

With IKEA, throw in some occasional weirdness, like the media console in my home that has mismatched drawers from a warehouse mistake, and you might feel pretty fond of your budget furniture. Even though it’s nowhere near the effort and pride resulting from lovingly handcrafting something from scratch, the journey of walking through displays, filling our carts, packing our cars, and wielding a tiny Allen wrench at home creates a memory and a little bond to our new particleboard family member. We love the things we create.

miscellany

• I’m happy to shout out any new way to help kick supervillain Jeff Bezos out of our lives: Bookshop.org’s new ebook platform lets you buy digital books for Android or iOS while supporting bookstores with your dollars. Check out their good deals! I personally prefer paper books but a few recent reads I recommend (either on paper or as audiobooks) are On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder or The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Both are extremely popular right now for a reason.

• Last month, everyone was talking about how helpful the Watch Duty app was during the devastating LA fires. It turns out the app is an example of a founder actively going against Silicon Valley norms by focusing on people over profit, and accurate just-in-time information over algorithms.

• Speaking of apps, The Happy Broadcast’s voice journaling app called Lid is surprisingly good, and free. I was pleasantly surprised at the thoughtful AI-guided mindfulness moments.

• Are physical interface buttons finally making a comeback? Human Factors Psychologists (like me) and regular people who get annoyed easily (also like me) could have told you that touch screens on cars and appliances are not a good idea. This short IEEE interview with tactile button expert Rachel Plotnick explains why “re-buttonization” is happening.