Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/10/14/ikea-shanghai-to-elderly-lone.html
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Umm it is a store not a public commons. Even a good sized coffee house is gonna be hey you are crowding out the customers if they just come in and hang out without purchasing a drip or something.
I feel for needing a place and think IKEA are being a bit dickish but I get where they are coming from.
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Maybe this is not the place to mention this, but there is a giant dog video at the top of my blog page…what is this?
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there is a meta topic already
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If they were smart they’d notice that they just found the replacement for horse in their meatballs.
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So they bring their own food to the cafeteria, classy
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Bunch’a freeloaders! Get a job, hippy!
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The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue.
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Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.
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Deliver me from Swedish furniture.
Deliver me from clever art.
“Imagine,” Tyler said, “stalking elk past department store windows and stinking racks of beautiful rotting dresses and tuxedos on hangers; you’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life, and you’ll climb the wristthick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. Jack and the beanstalk, you’ll climb up through the dripping forest canopy and the air will be so clean you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison to dry in the empty car pool lane of an abandoned superhighway stretching eight-lanes-wide and August-hot for a thousand miles.”
Chuck Palahniuk. Fight Club. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996.
Imagine, old people squatting in Ikea, and not wanting to buy anything…
Very Fight Club. Rock on, oldsters.
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Are you addressing the elderly of Shanghai? Because I don’t think they can hear you.
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Oh boy, don’t get me started on the “coffee house campers”.
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Sounds like a Raines Law Sandwich
(no relation)
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Still, some seniors complain about the new rule. “This is compulsory consumption. I don’t think it’s fair,” one told a local paper
As a side note, I can see “compulsory consumption” as the next step in China’s version of late-stage capitalism. If they’ve gone to all this trouble to create a wasteful Western-style middle class to constantly funnel money to their billionaires, they’re going to want them to act that way – like it or not.
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i know cory loves to rage against the machine, but ikea is running a business, not a nursing home. if people want to get together and hang out, they should do it at a park or something that’s made for that purpose, not a store.
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Except all of the places that are “made for that purpose” are being privatized and hedged off. I understand where Ikea is coming from, and I even sympathize, but also want to point out that there aren’t really any “public spaces” available for people to congregate that aren’t commercialized.
I do find it ironic, though, that this is very much an odd end result of a commons tragedy; when the commons have been displaced in favor of privatized spaces, then people will use the privatized spaces as a commons–and the private space being used is probably the best available, but not the original culprit of the displacement.
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I have been railing against the privatization of public space for many years, but I am not sure that encouraging ever-increasing levels of egotistical assholishnes is a sustainable solution to societal problems,
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It sucks to be old and in the way. Perhaps the compassionate billionaire class can come together and create a euthanasia coffee house…after you’ve been there X number of times they serve you a lethal dose in your tea or croissant and then dispose of you. One of the myths I used to hear about china was how they revered their elders…guess not.
Pity the money makers couldn’t be forced into creating a commons for the elders to go and hang out. Even if they had a place though there is the issue of not wanting to be forced out of the community of the living. Perhaps it feels good to see young people come in to get their Ikea junk or what merchandise is being sold. Maybe it feels good to think you still belong somewhere. I suppose some of the young and glamorous are offended by seeing the reality that they too will run down, wear out. It’s sad to face the burden of carrying age alone. Doesn’t Ikea have a snap-together coffin section where people could congregate? .
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But there are no public commons any more, or very few of them. Everything belongs to someone, the largest spaces belonging to the largest coherent entities on our planet, companies. The government owns a few for public use, but they are largely outdoor spaces, and besides, the government tends to want to control and monitor those spaces, too.
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Ever hear of the one-child policy and its effect on the shape of families?
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Therein lies the rub… At least around here we have numerous community centers and libraries for that kind of thing.
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Oh dude that is funny!
