David Rosenthal: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Or Bonobos. Yeah. There’s a store in a mall that you can go see the cars or see the pants, but you can’t take it home. Let’s illustrate why this is a completely nutty idea. (a) There’s the obvious. You can’t take it home. (b) The whole point of the mail order business was that buyers and sellers can now access each other across the whole country. All of Sweden as a market, all the rural areas everywhere in the country. Sweden is a pretty big geographical country. What Ingvar is doing here, they’re opening a showroom in one singular remote part of this country, in a town with 1000 people who live there. Their business model is to sell to the other towns of 1000 people all over the rest of the country. Why on earth would opening one showroom in one little town work? Here’s the thing. By God does it work? I don’t know that the customer base in the town of Älmhult was that important to IKEA itself. People come from all over the country to go to the showroom. This is wild. Ingvar advertises that they’re opening this for months leading up to the actual opening, which is in March of 1953. All of his customers and everybody getting the circular advertisements in the weekly paper all across the country, they’re hearing about this showroom in Älmhult on opening day in March of 1953. There are over 1000 people from all over the country who show up and wait in line to get in. Take the train, they somehow make their way to Älmhult to see the furniture. They’re not even buying anything. It’s crazy. Ingvar and the team, they’re so worried about this that they don’t know that the floorboards on the second floor of this old joinery—it’s an old building here—are going to stand up to 1000 people being up there, plus all the furniture that they have as the showroom. They had also advertised in the circulars that they were going to offer free coffee and morning buns to anybody coming to shop. The very first time there’s food at an IKEA is the very first time there’s an IKEA.…

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