Cheap Furniture

Ikea is pretty much the best store on the planet, in my opinion, and I’m having a really hard time living all of these millions of miles away from it. Last summer Ben and I made a special trip to California to buy some furniture…oh yeah, and also to see my family while we were there. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t seen my family for a year; Ikea was the first priority. We bought a coffee table, an end table, and light fixtures for our entire house for $200. We also looked at some dressers, but we couldn’t decide whether two dressers were worth another $250.

Now that I’ve done my research and I realize that two dressers are definitely worth $250, I can’t get to Ikea. So I decided to try to order them online. I had already heard that their shipping prices were ridiculous, but I guess I didn’t totally believe it.

Surprise! It costs almost $200 to ship $250 worth of stuff. It’s TOTALLY ridiculous. And they don’t just tell you when you place the order that shipping costs $200. They send you an e-mail message after you’ve already told them your credit card number that says, “Oh, by the way, the shipping costs $200. And here are a lot of other words to hide the fact that we’re charging you an extra 80% of your total cost for shipping. Hopefully you won’t even see the shipping amount and you’ll just click reply so we can totally rip you off without you even knowing it.”

I’m so mad about it that I almost think I should boycott Ikea. But instead I’ll just tell myself that the shipping people don’t have anything to do with Ikea, and Ikea hates them just as much as I do, and Ikea and I are on the same team. Then I’ll just have to figure out a way to convince my parents to come visit me after making a pit stop at Ikea.