Winnipeg has nothing left to give if Jesus Christ decides to come back to this world at the corner of Portage and Main.
That’s because we maxed out everything when IKEA announced it would come to Winnipeg by 2013. Print, television, radio and online media fell over backward to make that their lead story for days and, indeed, weeks on end. Provincial and civic governments were quick to commit millions of dollars in infrastructure spending to finalize the Swedish furniture giant’s future site and citizens danced in the streets as if our home teams had just won the Stanley Cup, the World Series, the Super Bowl and the World Cup on the same afternoon.
What is it about IKEA that makes Winni-peggers go so crazy? Is it the inexpensive yet sleek European furniture? Is it the chance to build futons, bookcases and beds with really tiny tools? Is it our chance to pretend we’re as beautiful and famous as ABBA, Bjorn Borg and Ingrid Bergman?
Well, for starters, despite being almost 135 years old, the city has the inferiority complex of an awkward, overweight, pimply-faced, Coke-bottle-bottom eyeglasses-wearing teenager. The outbreaks seem to flare up only when somebody famous — say a movie star — visits to shoot a few scenes for a film or makes a charitable appearance. Fans stake out the rumoured site hours in advance in hopes of catching a glimpse of or (gasp!) meeting the celebrity and grabbing digital pictures for their Facebook pages. They squeal with delight when the star says what a nice place we have here. But when Harry Connick Jr. said he’d never felt such cold as while filming Chilled in Miami here last year, our shoulders slumped; it’s back to the shrink’s couch for more therapy.
Part of our infatuation with IKEA comes from the fact the Swedish-founded but now Swiss-owned company had shunned us on so many occasions in the past. IKEA had said we were too small to support a store or that building here would cannibalize its Winnipeg mail-order business.
In a city still smarting from the departure of the National Hockey League’s Winnipeg Jets more than a decade ago, IKEA’s reluctance to commit to us, despite our never-ending displays of undying love, was almost too much to bear. Edmonton has a store; what’s wrong with us? IKEA’s refusal to build relegated us to second-tier status with almost no hope of getting back to the first division.
“IKEA coming to Winnipeg is something that validates us more than elevates us,” says Robert Warren, a retail analyst at the University of Manitoba’s I.H. Asper School of Business. “You always want what you can’t have. People would say, ‘We have to have it; we’re one step away from being a great city’.”
Personally, I’ve never understood Winnipeg’s widespread fascination with IKEA. Its furniture is quite useful when you’re a student, living on next to nothing. But when you’ve entered the workforce and make a decent living, there’s something to be said for buying something and having it delivered in a ready-to-use state.
Besides, whenever I built an IKEA purchase, there were so many nuts and bolts left over that I was always looking out of the corner of my eye whenever anybody sat down on it, just in case this was the time it would break.
So, I can take or leave IKEA. Wait, what’s that? IKEA’s 350,000-square-foot Winnipeg store is going to be its biggest in all of Canada? Now I get it: the company was just waiting to build us the best store in the country!
I wonder if it will stock gold, frankincense and myrrh? IE
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