And about IKEA...

[randomness]

thespian just reminded me of a couple of things I liked about IKEA.

1) European-style shopping carts: all four wheels pivot! You can spin the cart while still moving more or less forward. Fun! More practically, you can shift the whole cart sideways, which is helpful in tight spaces. Making a turn with a heavily-laden cart is a bit more of a problem because the inertia isn't so easily shifted with all four wheels free to turn.

2) Display copies of books from Scandinavia and the Baltic! I looked at books published in Stockholm, Helsinki, Tallinn, and Vilnius. You haven't lived until you've looked at a Disney book translated into Lithuanian. (No, I can't read Lithuanian.) There was also a quadrilingual childrens dictionary, including English, that we wanted to get for bedfull_o_books's niece, but frustratingly, they don't sell the books, even though they have dozens of copies of them.

I'm guessing they pick up overstock from Scandinavia and the Baltic and use them as display books here in the States on the theory that no one will actually want the books. But we do!