"[...]Flatpack meant making things so cheap, in fact, that furniture, instead of accumulating emotional weight as it was passed down the generations, would come to seem transient and disposable - and that one recent soggy Saturday, in a seethingly crowded branch of Ikea at Brent Park, north London, a young couple would gaze at a Lack sidetable, and then, with fond exasperation, at each other, and have the following conversation:

"But it's only £8."

"But we don't need it."

"But it's only £8!"

"But we don't ... OK. Whatever. Whatever."

The Guardian, on IKEA

Some excerpts:

[Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the affair, though, came several days after the initial revelations, when a Swedish tabloid claimed that Ikea had itself been established using Nazi money. The allegation was never substantiated, but Kamprad's response was extraordinary: it didn't seem to be the Nazi part that had offended him the most. "They could have accused me of murder," he exploded, according to Torekull, "but not of borrowing money!"]

And of course:

[And yet Ikea has never really become a target of antiglobalisation activists. A child labour scandal among some of its rug suppliers in 1990s was quickly addressed with an admission of guilt and strenuous new guidelines. (Two bombs in Dutch stores in 2002, initially linked to such protests, seem to have been part of a blackmail plot.]