Oh, IKEA!
Please do not smite me for not buying any of your Swedish-designed furnishings during my last visit by dropping one of your yellow and blue football field-sized stores on top of me!
I’m sorry that I didn’t purchase any of your cheap furnishings with names that sound like they were created using random Scrabble letters puked out by a five-year-old who didn’t know better. But believe me I wanted to walk out with enough furniture to put my modest two-bedroom apartment through an extreme makeover, but it would be difficult to ship all of it from California to this rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, unless you IKEA, made a cheap boat that could be put together with single sheet of simple instructions.
To appease you IKEA, I did not leave totally empty-handed. I purchased one of your IKEA plastic shopping bag for five cents at the checkout counter. Sure, other stores don’t charge me for plastic bags, but I was more than happy to buy one from you so that I don’t get a VIREN or a LILLHOLMEN reamed up any of my orifices by you.
Actually, my friend purchased it and I have yet to pay her back for it. To make up my debt to her, I plan to stand at the corner and flash a little skin at those who pass by and hopefully someone will throw a nickel my way to make me cover myself up. I actually wanted your big blue 59-cent reusable IKEA bag, but I would have to go down on too many people to make that kind of money.
Although, I can reuse your five-cent IKEA shopping bag if I wanted to. I can use it as a trash bag, water bucket, interrogation tool, for a kindergarden sack race, the worst deep sea diver’s helmet EVER, or storage for all the other plastic shopping bags I have. I can also use it for making cheesy rain sound effects in the background whenever I sing the Guns N’ Roses song “November Rain” at karaoke or for making really good plastic shopping bag crumpling sound effects whenever someone is bagging my groceries at the grocery store.
While the bag’s transparency makes it hard to hide from others unwrapped gifts, chopped up body parts, or a collection of Lance Bass clippings from Teen Beat and Tiger Beat magazines, its size is significantly larger than the plastic shopping bags from most grocery stores.
These two attributes make your IKEA Plastic Bag the ideal bag for carrying a baby or toddler…if the bag didn’t say “Esta bolsa no es un juguete, puedo causar sofocacion, mantenga bolsa plastica fuera del alcance de los ninos o bebes.” The transparency of the bag would’ve made it easy to see what a kid is up to, while its size would’ve been able to hold not only a child, but also a few toys, some snacks, and a snorkel to help them breathe.
Well IKEA, hopefully the purchase of your five-cent plastic bag won’t cause you to punish me for not purchasing any of your inexpensive furniture, because I don’t think I could handle the punishment of eating a billion of your delicious Swedish meatballs in a row.
(Editor’s Note: IKEA in the US is now charging five cents per plastic bag to discourage shoppers from using them, which in turn will slightly help reduce the waste caused by plastic bags every year. You can read more about it here.)
Item: IKEA Plastic Bag
Price: 5 cents
Purchased at: IKEA
Rating: 3 out of 5
Pros: Big plastic bag. Big IKEA logo on both sides. Comes with built-in handles. Would make a good kiddie transport, if not for the warnings on the bag. Inexpensive Swedish-designed furnishings.
Cons: Most expensive plastic shopping bag ever. Being punished by IKEA for leaving a store empty-handed. Bad for the environment. Bag’s transparency makes it hard to hide your clippings of Lance Bass. Having clippings of Chris Kirkpatrick. The number of people I’d have to go down on to make 59 cents.