As our regulars readers will doubtless recall, when the pangs of cultural longing take hold of us, we at Mediolana never discount IKEA as a source of inspiration; the Sweden-inaugrated, Holland-headquarted purveyor of ready-to-assemble furniture (‘RTA’) has never been found wanting when it comes to making us think, rethink and rethink again. The secret of IKEA is, of course, that the process of upgrading one’s kitchen, living room or office is never about purchasing a China-manufactured cutlery holder or a plush heart-shaped pillow stitched together by some diligent Indonesian; rather, it is much more about the invariable reflection involved in such an undertaking. Additionally, the high (post-)modernity and giant scale of IKEA stores – in London at least, it seems that the location of an IKEA is restricted to the limits of North American-style suburban retail parks – encourages a certain kind of awe, as if passing through a secular Church of Functional Consumption.
Yet on a material level at least, IKEA is not all about funky document bins or, as we noted in our post of 9th September 2011, polyester footballs. Little known even to most who shop at the brainchild of Ingvar Kamprad is something that will be, at least to many British consumers, a breath of fresh air that is found within the depths of IKEA shops nationwide: the Swedish Food Market (‘SFM’). Stocking a limited range of essential items such as chocolate and crab paste, the SFM seems to source most of its wares direct from Sweden itself or Germany, so quality is not so much assured as adored.
But there is something profoundly confusing about the SFM: while one would expect a niche store within a store to slap niche prices on its merchandise, IKEA’s Swedish Food Market appears to do anything but. Our blogger-in-chief was able to pick up four substantial gourmet items (a large slab of hazelnut chocolate, a huge tube of the aforementioned crab paste, a family-size packet of sour cream and onion crisps and some cool-looking dunkies) for a frankly absurdly cheap £4.05; at a rough guess, this is something like 50-60% of the price for the equivalent items in the Waitrose or Sainsbury’s high street chains, despite the fact that all of the foodstuffs are imported and are of absolutely superb calibre.
We are at a loss to explain this phenomenon, though it does remind us somewhat of the situation in international supermarkets across London, where Turkish pasta sauce, Korean noodle snacks and flour from Bosnia and Herzegovina somehow manage to be more economical than their processed equivalents hailing from the English countryside. However, in a United Kingdom which is experiencing significant price inflation, such an extraordinary price differential is, at the very least, food for thought.
