Boycott IKEA

I know this isn't a popular sentiment, but IKEA just pushed me over the edge yesterday. Bottom line is that for a store that tries to get all sorts of environmental cred, they are the worst abusers of the disposable culture ethos. I'd much rather pay double or even triple for something that will be in usable condition for 20 times as long.

See, I bought this butter dish there a little over a year ago...
And the other day I was making mashed sweet potatoes for the girls. I heard this crunching sound when I went to cut off the butter and when I looked closely I realized part of the glass edge of the dish had chipped off on the butter pat. It had stuck to the butter and I was now mixing it in with their food. I looked even more closely and saw that there were a bunch of small to large chips missing from the inside edge of the butter dish. I tried to take a pic and it didn't really show the chipping but for what it's worth...Who knows how many of those shards we've ingested over the past year?

Now we are not hard on things, and use dull butter knives. So I emailed IKEA corporate saying this was a dangerous item and got this reply that basically said (and I'm paraphrasing to adhere to their privacy clauses):

thanks for writing. we forwarded your message to someone else. i hope this email has been helpful.

So I decided to pack us all in the car and go return the butter dish. Get some sort of credit. And try to be helpful to them because it really shouldn't disintegrate in your food that way.

Well they basically laughed at me at the return counter, focusing on the fact that it was A YEAR OLD and the unspoken message was: what here is supposed to last that long? They weren't even interested in taking a report about it being possibly dangerous.

I vowed to never go back there unless there's some really compelling reason. With craigslist you can find much sturdier, REAL furnishings at competitive prices anyway, unless you're way into it being brand new. So I got everyone back in the car and we headed off to Goodwill (the one on San Pablo near Ashby - love that store). Unfortunately no butter dish there, but we got a bunch of good stuff for them to use for playing pretend kitchen.

As far as Boycotting IKEA, I googled that and it turns out I have some very diverse company:

• a pro-Israel group that was mad at Sweden;
• white extremists - they're going nuts (no wait they're already nuts) over ads that show couples from different ethnic backgrounds - not gonna deign their hate speech with a link;
• Catholic politicians in Italy who are upset IKEA doesn't sell nativity scenes;
• and even our mild-mannered neighbors to the north, Canadians who say IKEA was offering unfair pricing schemes up north and blocking access to the US website for comparison shopping.