Stories from Ikea Tottenham

My mum’s worked for Ikea since 2016

My mum’s worked for Ikea since 2016. Though the store was previously called Ikea Edmonton, it was renamed Tottenham, as I suppose more people know where that is.

First Mum was employed as a table-tidier and barista in the restaurant, and later, she transferred to working the shelves downstairs, rotating pillow covers and table linen. When she originally applied for the job, I was the one who wrote her CV and my brother and I drilled her on interview questions. I often nobly remind myself of this and think of myself as responsible for the achievements she has made over her 6 subsequent years at the establishment. In the end credits of the film adaptation of her retail employment story, you’d catch me listed there as Writer and Producer. Until that is made, you have the following anecdotes about it, which I have composed for you.

During lockdowns, shopping spaces became somewhere people could try to claw back some of their humanity. There, they gave themselves a few minor rewards whilst they were being starved of so many other happinesses. But like most other workers who provided amenities to us or otherwise looked after us, my mum has had to vividly confront the rougher aspects of her job in the last two years. When Covid-19 was killing over a thousand people a day, she was made to go in five days a week. She was the first in our family to catch the virus, during the 2020 winter peak, as shoppers descended on the branch in seemingly endless droves. Now, as the store announces its closure, she’s facing being laid off.

While conditions were sometimes inhospitable, the shop enacted something of a gravitational force on the lives around it. It was a big part of my mother’s world and my family’s world, so as our local branch confronts its demise, I have gathered some of my most memorable Ikea moments here.

Bedrooms

It’s late summer 2021 and I have been feeling overwhelmed from my 9-5 job, from which I’ve taken a week of leave. I’ve moved into a house with Zaahid, Han and Liza recently, and it’s been bittersweet noticing the permeability of their weekly routines, which really contrast with my desk-bound and bedroom-bound full-time grind. I’m still figuring out how to tetris the furniture into the box room at the back of the house.

Mum and I have come here as I need a wardrobe and bed. Having a parent with a staff discount who works in a cheap furniture store, when you’re a cheap person who needs to furnish a house, is quite handy economically. We walk in reverse through the store, starting downstairs because we need to return something first. In the plants section, a voice calls ‘Auntie!’ at my Mum. It’s Diane’s son, Michael, and he’s quite handsome. They exchange some threats about infecting each other with Covid, and discuss that snack she needs to bring him to try. I find out a few months later that Michael has quit Ikea because he’s depressed about how much the whole job has taken out of him. Mum says that her colleague Tomasz, who can be a bit of a pest, made Michael cry when he nitpicked a job he’d done. He made Michael, a grown man — she repeats — cry.

We weave through the showroom using her insider shortcuts, striding through secret wall openings, making a beeline for the Bedrooms section. Mum is Rambo, hacking through the jungle with her machete. In every section she greets a friend and shows her daughter off, not at all to my displeasure. Everyone is interested in and delighted by the pure fact of my existence. Some of them comment on our shared likeness. I greet Kash, Carol, Veronica, and best of all, Diane. She looks like she’s in her mid-40s but I know it’s possible that she’s older than that — I think of Michael who’s mid to late 20s. Diane is quite matter-of-fact, her smile is a relaxed, amused one, and I try hard to be charming. She and my mum work closely together in their department and I recall them having some antagonism when Mum first moved there (Mum denies this now as Diane and her are firm friends).

We get to the store before my mum’s shift starts so we can shop, but we have limited time. Mum needs to get changed and all of that faff before work. I have a relatively firm idea of what I want to buy, but once we’re there opening dresser doors and eyeing headboards, things aren’t what I expected and I have difficulty pivoting from the original vision. I feel indecisive. My Mum makes a few suggestions, all of which I simply can’t process. A double bed drops out of the running, as each one is a centimetre or two too big for my room. Customers march around us through the cursed labyrinth. Though the solutions aren’t quite there, my clothes have been piled up in plastic bags for over a month and I don’t think I can go away empty handed. I’m faltering.

Mum gestures for us to sit down on a display bed nearby. “Alright, you think about it,” she says, in no rush, unusual for her. She pulls up WeChat on her phone to scroll through pictures while I deliberate. I have been feeling homesick for my parents and for Edmonton, but at this moment I feel a tranquil washing over me. I decide not to buy the wardrobe.

Duvets

My mum is quite loyal to Ikea as an employer, and gets quite concerned about the losses suffered by the department she’s in - Textiles - which she tells me is one of the easiest and most profitable for people to steal from.

One time, thieves steal a whole shelf of duvets in one fell swoop. They use a few duffel bags. Mum tells me the story. She swishes her arm in a horizontal movement and “KWAA!” is the onomatopoeia she uses to invoke the sound of the packets being displaced.

When they see the thieves coming out of Ikea’s parking lot exit, Mum’s manager Tim is outside having a cigarette with another colleague of hers, Liv. It’s actually pretty unusual that anyone gets caught stealing at Ikea, but in this instance they’ve been brazen about it. I can only assume that Mum’s colleagues have informed each other about the suspects over their radio devices, driven by a kind of justice-seeking laser focus otherwise seen only in BBC crime dramas.

When Tim and Liv actually spot them, the duvet guys make a dash for it, duffels in hand. Tim chases them as fast as he can go but they make it to the fence, where they chuck bags over the top and duck out through a hole. It’s a close shave for the duvet guys, who live to rob another day. Mum’s incensed by these events, and shakes her head as she relates the scandal.

As part of a quest for lawfulness in the Textile department, Tim has asked the team to move all the high quality rugs into one corner. This defensive behaviour comes about after two guys nick a £1,200 rug in broad daylight. “I’ve seen them do it with my own eyes — I watched the CCTV, after it happened,” Mum says.

She explains why the new layout for the section is counterintuitive: now she has to keep an eye on that one corner of the shop floor at the expense of everything else. In Textiles, the customer information desk is positioned to one side, but she’s noticed that elsewhere, in Living Rooms, the desk is in the middle. This has the benefit of giving the worker an unrestricted view of all proceedings — panopticon style. She has passed her feedback on to Tim, but has seen no change, and continues to put up with the inconvenience of a poorly-optimised workspace, day after day.

“Why haven’t we moved the textiles desk to the middle yet?” she asks Tim.

Tim tells her they’ll have it moved in two weeks.

“In China, they build whole hospitals in 10 days,” my Mum muses.

Training

My mum is really a massive goodie two shoes. There’s one time Tim tells her she needs to take some of the afternoon off the shopfloor to go on the staff intraweb and do one of the trainings, and then print off her certificate to show him. It’s right before the first lockdown in 2020 when Ikea’s still open. Trouble is, she’s so preoccupied doing another job that day she doesn’t get round to doing that training.

So she logs in her spare time — after work — and she can’t remember which course Tim has asked her to do, so she does them all. Her thinking is that she’ll ask him when she next sees him to confirm which one it was.

When she tells me about this she reels off the topics to me, pretty proud of herself. Diversity and inclusion, taking payments, GDPR, health and safety. She really is an exemplary employee.

Next day, turns out Tim doesn’t even remember which training it was. Tim, who couldn’t give less of a shit, says to her well done and could she get the rest of the team to do the training too. Mum’s glowing when she relates this praise to me. I ask her how much she really thinks Tim is invested in his employees’ grasp of GDPR. She tells me it’s really not about what others think, but about the type of person you are. It's about staying true to the standards you hold yourself to.

Damn, I think, my mum’s pretty annoying.

Reclamations

For a while Mum wanted to work in one specific department in the shop that held something of a mythological status.

She’s always having trouble with customers who really want to know what the bedding feels like. They’re not satisfied with touching mere display items — they need to make contact with the real deal to believe it. When they open up the packaging, most of the bedsheets are assigned to my mum to stuff back in to their ziplock plastic wraps. The others, the ones she can’t return to a state of factory-freshness, go through a process of demotion.

Most of the shittier and faulty products people won’t really want. But there’s one place that’s a holding area for inferior goods. A purgatory where reject furniture is offered for rehoming despite its defects. Overly-manhandled carpets, scratched up wooden chairs, ragged curtains: this carnival of chaos is named the Reclamations section.

In her personal life, my mother is a follower of consumerism to purist levels. Integrity is a big thing for her when she’s spending her money. She finds the idea of tarnished goods disdainful and has always frowned upon my taste for second-hand clothing. Here, however, the existence of this depraved section of the home furnishings market induces a kind of awe in her.

See, some out-of-season collections are so rarefied that no matter what surface-level imperfections a product possesses, there will always be someone who’s so desperate to buy it that they are willing to trawl the depths of the Reclamations freakshow.

It could be sort of beautiful if you wanted to think about it as a spiritual metaphor. Though, in business terms it’s only really moving some damaged goods into another part of the store and voila, making your money. “Ikea has it pretty much figured out,” my mum says.

Covid

Even though she is a Sagittarius, my mother is a worrier. I haven’t looked up the intricacies of her other astrological placements and I am unsure whether this arises in some way from her natural constitution or from her years of life as an immigrant mother who has had to defend her family from many threats, real and imagined.

During much of 2020 she has visions of both of her children, Kevin and I, felled by Covid-19, hooked up to respirators and struggling for life. When I offer feebly to do my bit for the household by going to buy groceries, she says if anyone catches Covid it’s best if it’s her. She’s probably right, because she’s physically the fittest out of the three of us. I rank Dad at the bottom for Covid resistance and myself in the middle, but that’s only because Dad is over 65. I only scrape past him, as he does go for a run every day.

Mum’s furlough period only lasts a handful of weeks. Although furniture retail is not an essential service, people have been languishing in their drab homes for too long and urgently/lucratively need to redecorate their spaces. So when the government says the high street can open again, Ikea takes up the opportunity promptly. On the first day the shop is open, the queues are immense. People are fighting with each other to make their purchases. I think of the stampede in 2005, on Ikea’s opening day, where 20 people suffered heat exhaustion as they fell over each other to buy things. (Everyone was saying that a man was stabbed, though I think actually the stabbing was unrelated). All of this in the name of cheap furniture. Mum’s terrified about Covid, which she will almost certainly catch, and Dad and I wring our hands at home.

Some months into this situation, Ikea’s business continues to flourish, while its employees shoulder the burden of the surges in customers, masks on, disinfecting everything but still feeling defenceless. Tens of thousands of people catch a potentially lethal disease each day. Mum has begun to take a cynical attitude toward her employers, who have been opaque about the number of Covid cases there have been in the workplace. Mum is feeling a lot of sympathy for and solidarity with her colleagues at this point.

Then, news gets around about a death in the company. I ask mum more about it, and she says it was a man, that he had had shortness of breath. He’d been feeling sick for a couple of days already, and another colleague told him he needed to see a doctor. At the GP, they checked his chest and gave him the all-clear. He actually died the next day.

Mum shows me his image, from a group chat on Whatsapp. It’s a portrait, a Black man in his early forties. She doesn’t have a name, but she’s sad when she tells me that she knows his face, which she’s seen around the store.

I check for news about him online but don’t find anything, not at that time, nor months later. On gov.uk I pull up the stats for the total number of Covid deaths from the last two years and it's a long number, impossible really to comprehend. 6 digits of cognitive dissonance.

D-Day

I wake up around 9AM and I grab my phone. I ritually check for the sweet good notifications from social media which I hope will give me the dopamine I need to stay awake.

The message I see this morning is from Mum and it says “Our store will be permanently closed on 31/8” and she is talking about Ikea.

That evening, she forwards me some PDFs. There’s a factsheet with initial info about how workers will go through a consultation process. They make it clear that if agreements aren’t reached, the company is still able to proceed with their proposals to shut it down. Another one shows some frequently asked questions for employees. Throughout the documents the word they use to describe the closure of the store is “transformation”.

It’s only 3 days since I’ve started looking through old stories my mum has told me and typing them up. I have been trying to write down stories about all the people I love in the hopes of compiling something I might want to share with other people. But then I think there’s probably enough material from Ikea alone to fill a book.

Crayfish

A major fixture in my household is Ikea’s event for “Swedish National Day” which is the 6th of June. Sometimes, if it’s not sold out, you can pay to join the party on the door, but as a coworker, my mother gets access to an exclusive presale (not at any discount, mind you). Me and my father wait like obedient soldiers at the entrance as she hands us the slips of paper that let us in, as well as a token for one shot of Schnapps each. Then, we go enter the restaurant where we gorge ourselves upon a buffet of crayfish while we get serenaded by an Abba tribute band. The whole Chinese population of Enfield is gathered there on that one day, but it’s not necessarily a communal affair. You’re really going there to eat as much as you can. It’s one of the few occasions my seafood-obsessed father will pay to eat food at a business establishment and not just tolerate it, but exhibit outright joy.

The first time we attend, it’s before my mum’s moved departments to downstairs, so she’s working in the restaurant. It’s her idea to invite Old Yang, a friend of my father’s. He used to work with him when he was a portrait artist in Covent Garden in the 2000s, until Yang had a series of difficult spells with his mental health that meant he had to go on the dole. My mother is busy helping out with the event, or is otherwise occupied being a social butterfly, so it’s the three of us. It’s during Corbyn’s first campaign for PM and my father tells me and Yang we should talk to each other about the Labour Party. I’m paying a pound a month in membership fees to them, and Yang has nothing but positivity to convey to us about the British welfare state, which he says saved his life, so all is jovial.

There’s a small stage set up before the windowed seating area, and we must be nearly an hour into the meal when the opening tones of ‘Waterloo’ cut across the chatter. We didn’t know music would feature in this afternoon’s events. A troupe clad in wigs, silk robes and gogo boots suddenly appears, and a kind of chill takes over Yang’s face.

“Abba’s my favourite band,” his manages to utter, before going straight to the front to dance.

The group do all of the hits, and all the kids in attendance are loving it too, running around. At the climax of ‘Fernando’, Mum’s colleagues Stefan and George wheel out a three-foot long cake decorated with frilly cream and sugar-dusted strawberries. Stressed grown men, seeking to obtain a slice, elbow their way into the sea of children which has enveloped the cake trolley.

“Can you hear the drums Fernando?
Do you still recall the fateful night we crossed the Rio Grande?
I can see it in your eyes
How proud you were to fight for freedom in this land”

Looking back I can’t tell who’s more ecstatic to be there, Yang, who’s bopping and clapping, or my father, who’s beaming — sure, it’s me who keeps pointing the camera at him and telling him to hold his crayfish up at me as if it’s still alive, but if you see the pictures, there’s a glint in his eye that’s anything but posed.

Cafeteria

It’s 2017 and Mum works in the restaurant. For a week, she takes me there in the morning and leaves me sitting there for the whole day so I can work on my two essays for uni, which will be due at the week’s end and which I have not done. I like using cafes to do my work as the soft tinkling of cutlery and general hubbub puts me at ease. But the Ikea restaurant in particular, I am to realise, works wonders when a normal level of focus isn’t enough and I need to get extremely in the zone. There’s something about its seating area with its floor to ceiling glazing, reminding you that you are suspended amidst a sea of car parks, that makes it feel like a special, if somewhat industrial, spiritual retreat.

Once I’m connected to the Customer Wifi a tranquility settles over me, and I can type away with ease until I have to go to the bathroom or eat something. One of the days I go there my mum has an early shift, and I start off with a breakfast (fried). But mostly it’s lunch, and when my mum gets a moment she steps away from clearing tables so she can usher me through the queue. She gestures to the food and drink on the metal counters with incredible sense of largesse. You want an apple and ginger smoothie? Grab it. A slice of frangipani? Why not. A portion of Daim cake? Two desserts are better than one!

At the mains counter, we wait patiently for the kitchen workers to spot us. When Mum’s colleague Matteo sees I’m with her, it’s all smiles and winks and extra meatballs.

At the till it’s either Malaysian Jan or her husband. Jan is brimming with things to say to my mother, speaks with an urgent, conspiratorial whisper, and lets me have a free coke. Her husband has a slow and gentle way about him, and plays it by the book. Though we fork up an undiscounted rate for the food like every other normal paying customer, I sit down feeling like she just pulled off a slick con.

The days roll by calmly, I read papers about ‘mass consumption’ and fill up a word quota. As the hours progress, I bob with the tide of the cafeteria, listening to parents coordinating their infant children, asking Mum or one of her friends to make me coffee, migrating from table to table when I want a new perspective. It always ends the same way, the white cleaning spray, blue roll, the yellow cleaning spray, terry cloth. Chairs up-ended on tables. Clouds crawling across the darkening sky. A donut in a paper bag to go, from the staff’s quarters. Me and Mum heading home.