Lindsay Toler
Did you get yours?
At first, I only saw them in my newsfeed.
Everyday for the last two weeks or so, someone I knew posted a photo of their IKEA catalogue on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. The posts were always enthusiastic and typically punctuated with exclamation points: “Lookie what came!!” “So excited to get this in the mail!” etc.
I brushed them off at first. After all, there are twice as many IKEA catalogues printed each year than copies of the Bible. I figured my friends must have succumbed to the same fever that has already claimed these desperate souls who’ll camp in a parking lot for a free sofa:
Then my own IKEA catalogue came. I brushed that off, too. I’ve been reporting on IKEA in St. Louis since before there *was* an IKEA in St. Louis, and it’s not uncommon for companies to add reporters’ addresses to their mailing lists. I must have put my home address on a form at a press conference or something, I told myself.
But I was starting to have doubts. Every time I drove by a bus stop featuring an ad announcing that IKEA opens here September 30, I realized that mass-mailing a 326-page book to an entire city was well within IKEA’s abilities and budget.
So I asked my office: Did you recently get an IKEA catalogue? Eight out of ten co-workers had. Of those eight, none had received a catalogue from the Swedish furniture retailer before, and they lived all over the region: downtown, Webster Groves, Maplewood, Brentwood, Central West End, south County.
Then I poked around on Twitter and found I’m not the only one asking this question.
Now I’m asking you, SLM readers. With less than a day to go before IKEA opens in St. Louis, will you help solve the mystery? Have you received your IKEA catalogue?
And since it seems most of us have an IKEA catalogue now, here’s a video of German literary critic Hellmuth Karasek reviewing it:
Contact Lindsay Toler by an email at LToler@stlmag.com or on Twitter @StLouisLindsay. For more from St. Louis Magazine, subscribe or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
