The Hidden Pleasures of Life

by Theodore Zeldin

  Though he urged his employees to innovate and use their own judgement, in reality they were surrounded with strict rules as to what they could do. So, like Walmart, IKEA grew and grew and remained the same. It became international because its competitors in Sweden boycotted it for undercutting them, and the only way it could survive was by going abroad for supplies, and getting them much more cheaply there, first in Poland and then in other low-wage countries. Kamprad’s sympathies were more international than Walton’s: ‘I was in Prague the day the Russian tanks crushed a protesting student, arousing the wrath of the world. I arrived two days after the fall of the Berlin Wall.’ He ‘fell in love’ with the people of Poland, ‘their good hearts and their skills’, theirs was ‘a second home’ to him. He taught his children to speak four languages. But the panacea of low prices depended on buying from poor countries with low wages, which could not continue forever; and most people in the world have remained too poor to afford IKEA furniture. The clash between the values of thrift and the business need to tempt customers to spend as much as possible awaited resolution.

  To create a unique business brand, Kamprad insisted on the firm identifying itself as quintessentially and unchangingly Swedish, but that did not necessarily appeal to everyone in old civilisations with different ideas of elegance. The suppliers in India, often highly educated in both their own and Western traditions, resented it that IKEA’s buyers spoke to them only about delivery dates and prices, avoided making friends and refused to come to their weddings, because that might suggest bribery and corruption. Though Kamprad worried that the emotional bonds that kept his company together would fade as it got ever bigger, he liked growing bigger because it gave him a sense of achievement, but then he lamented that the results we not those he had hoped for. Economies of scale and mass production have meant that stores all over the world look very similar and contain the same goods.

  ‘I wish’, said Ingvar Kamprad, ‘I was a bit cultured, like Margaretha [his wife, who used to be a primary school teacher]. She reads novels. The best I can do is to take a few catalogues and leaf through them.’ He sensed there was something missing, but was unable to see precisely what culture could do for commerce. That was because the flirtations between business and art have not yet matured into asking what more they could achieve together if they thought harder about where else their differences could lead them. Commerce means not just buying and selling but communication too, which is also what culture seeks. Business is not only about making money: originally the word ‘business’ meant anxiety, and anxiety certainly dominates it still. The most precious commodity that is traded is not gold, but time, deciding what can most usefully be done each day. But because culture has been largely relegated to providing entertainment or consolation after work, rather than being recognised as the ingredient that gives meaning to it, business has done little to exhibit the inspiration that can be extracted from the vast range of its experiences. So long as business is treated as a technique, which can be taught, it cannot offer what is popularly known as a ‘philosophy’, meaning a vision of what life is for. A technique is a procedure used to accomplish a task, whereas a ‘philosophy’ involves a lifelong pursuit of a broader understanding beyond one’s particular occupation. So long as business is obsessed by its balance sheet, it forgets that wealth without wisdom is bread without water, and thirst kills more quickly than hunger. Because financial success does not give moral authority, business has been grounding its prestige on borrowed ideologies, as when it ‘conquers’ markets in the military tradition, or encodes its practices in the language of the social sciences, or reinterprets the teachings of religions to suit its purposes. It remains ambushed by contradictory attitudes to work, uncertain whether leisure is the ultimate goal, or whether some kinds of work are nobler than others, or whether fulfilment is to be found in the performance of a single mastered skill. Is business still in its adolescence then, delighting in youthful bravura, with each generation trying to outrun its predecessor, and is full maturity reached only when it has comprehensive thoughts about ‘busy-ness’, what it is worth being busy about and what to do with time? Saving time in the name of efficiency, fighting time because there is never enough, killing time because it moves too slowly, spending time as though it is money, when time is obviously more precious than money, these are all preliminary dalliances with the mystery of ‘busy-ness’, which has still to reveal how the infinite variety of each moment of life can be meaningful and memorable.

  Time is no longer what it was in the aftermath of the Second World War, when Walmart and IKEA defined their ambitions. Never have humans had such long expectations of life (thirty more years than in 1900), and never have they had so much leisure (the thirty-seven-hour or even forty-eight-hour week, spread over the year, taking account of all weekends and holidays, equals only four or five hours of work a day). And yet never have humans complained so much that they do not have enough time for all the demands upon them and all the temptations that distract them. When workers are segregated to perform precisely defined tasks, they are not invited to savour the multiple qualities of time as experienced by different occupations. Business is in an impasse talking about work–life balance, implying that work is not life. What people expect from work is no longer so obvious. All this provides the opportunity to redefine business, to open a new chapter in its ambitions and significance, to rethink what work could be, and to find unexplored value in those varied forms of memory and curiosity and imagination that are called culture, that are indispensable to a full life, and that every customer brings with them.

  The ‘consumer society’ may be only a preliminary stage in the evolution of human interaction. Being propelled by the ingenuity of a small number of people constantly inventing more and more objects, it is plunged into repeated crises by the difficulty of finding buyers who can afford them. It may seem that there is no alternative, since consumerism has survived the complaints against it, as the materialist enemy of spiritual values, for at least five hundred years, not only in the West but in the East as well; the complaints re-emerge in every period of prosperity and of wasteful extravagance, but they have little practical effect because consumers are also workers who desperately need buyers for what they produce. Shopping, moreover, has established itself as a mute language using goods rather than words to demonstrate what kind of person one wishes to be, to show affection with the gifts one buys, to impress neighbours with the display of one’s acquisitions, and to assert individual taste or group solidarity by one’s choices. So long as some people have many more comforts than others, the consumer society will always have its appeal. But it is worth exploring the possibility that the ever-growing hunger for new experiences and the relentless questioning of existing practices may cause the emergence, alongside the consumer society, of other societies, challenging it both from within and without.

  [23]

  Are there more amusing ways of earning a living?

  WHAT WOULD HAPPEN if Ingvar Kamprad, the creator of IKEA, started reading novels, just like his wife? His Testament of a Furniture Dealer is already almost a novel, a fervent romantic vision of a more beautiful world, of a small group of people ‘breaking free from status and convention’, determined to preserve the spirit of their youth and their ‘unconquerable enthusiasm’, always ready ‘to give each other a helping hand’, always having time to talk to each other, devoted to ‘kindness and generosity’, refusing to work just for money, taking the football team as their model of collaboration, prizing their uniqueness, always looking for new solutions, such as going to a window factory when searching for table legs and a shirt factory to get the cheapest cushion covers, insistent that ‘we will never have two identical stores’ because none can ever be perfect,

  untroubled by the fear of making mistakes, disdaining committees, bureaucracy, statistics and ‘exaggerated planning’, which is ‘the most common cause of corporate death’, responding to a rival who steals one of their ideas not with a la
wsuit but by inventing a new and better model, above all refusing to accept that anything is impossible and always looking forward to new adventures. Lista was Kamprad’s favourite old Swedish word, meaning ‘doing what you have to do with an absolute minimum of resources’: waste was ‘one of the greatest diseases of mankind’; so he fitted readily into the ideology of ‘sustainability’. However, the more IKEA expanded, the more he became a prisoner of the constraints he denounced. On the other hand, his customers are no longer neophytes in consumerism as they were when he started; they have been developing ideals which could combine with Kamprad’s vision of the future of work to inaugurate a new phase in social enterprise.

  Work does not have to be organised the way it is today. The struggle to earn a living does not have to be so harsh. New kinds of relationships can be encouraged in business, as they have been in private life. The young could invent different kinds of job to suit them better. It is possible to avoid falling into utopian temptations by undertaking small practical experiments to test how things could be different, without disrupting the routines of a whole organisation.

  I see Ingvar Kamprad’s as an unfinished life because though the IKEA stores are monuments to his memory, like pyramids, he dreamed of something more, but it became difficult to change his management structures. A home, which Kamprad set out to furnish, is no longer what it used to be. It is no longer enough for IKEA to stuff homes with its 9,500 varieties of tables, chairs, beds and household goods. A home may begin as a refuge where one can have one’s own possessions around one, but it evolves into a place which one values above all because it is where it is as important to feel understood as to be physically comfortable, and to be able to share one’s woes and joys with people who appreciate one another. A home is where one takes care of others and is taken care of, where one can offer hospitality to friends and potential friends, and where one can speak freely, revealing thoughts and emotions without danger. But a home can also be a solitary place. It is now one of the great personal and collective works of art that all humans spend their lives attempting to raise up and to keep from falling down; it is a cultural construct. A furniture store that promises ‘a better life’, which takes this evolution into account, cannot just exhibit forty-eight rooms furnished to suggest models of what a home could physically look like. It makes sense for IKEA to compete on price when customers short of money struggle to acquire the material signs of respectability, but when they have broader cultural aspirations, doing business with them could mean something quite different.

  Two centuries ago there were five times more shops in Britain than there are today, one for every fifty people, some with only two or three customers a day, and many deriving only a supplementary income from trade; half of London shopkeepers took in lodgers. In the late nineteenth century, in the villages of northern France, one in every three houses sold wine or spirits. In the U.S.A., the country store used to be the hub of all local farming and craft activity, accepting payment in every kind of produce. The first department stores did not just sell goods but became agents of middle-class aspirations, organising concerts and exhibitions, and becoming public places where women could safely go out on their own, meeting one another, acquiring new tastes, and spending money as they pleased. In 1881 ‘the sight of women addicted to this purse-destroying vice’ drove the male editors of the New York Times ‘almost to despair of the future of our country’; but Gordon Selfridge, who founded his store in London in 1909, and published a book entitled The Romance of Shopping, presenting it as an activity to be engaged in for pleasure and not out of necessity, replied: ‘This is not a shop, it is a community. Women come because it is so much brighter than their own homes.’ Oriental bazaars have long been almost informal parliaments. Charity shops are now often recreation grounds, with people coming in every day in their lunch break just for a chat, because they cannot think of anything else to do. Shops have been inventive in transforming themselves in the past and are clearly not doomed to remain always what they are today.

  IKEA has been keeping itself busy opening many new stores each year, but Kamprad warned his colleagues that ‘a company that feels it has reached its goal will quickly stagnate’: his firm now has the financial resources to be bolder in its experiments. It is mature enough to become a less timid host to the 600 million people who visit it each year, and who are not there just in search of purchases: they have emotional, intellectual and moral yearnings which are as important to them as their furnishings. They each have a story to tell and puzzles to solve around their own attempts at finding ‘a better life’. It is they, the infinitely diverse customers, who have the potential to give each store the elusive originality that Kamprad vainly hoped for. The bright lights of cities are increasingly dimmed by a fog of loneliness, so the pathway through the store that drives the customers, sheep-like, past endless exhibits without speaking to one another, misses one of the main reasons why they have come shopping, which is to get out of the solitude or boredom of their own home. Superstores forget that they are substitutes for the city square and market place where people used to come not just to buy but even more to socialise, strike deals, find employment and look for marriage partners. They have yet to imagine themselves as cultural and educational centres with a mission to enhance the richness of their customers’ lives, rather than simply encumber them with more possessions.

  The exploratory trial I was allowed to make in one IKEA store to discover how such a transformation could happen revealed that customers were keen to meet other customers they did not know; and when conversations with a stranger were organised for them around an evening meal in the restaurant, with a Menu of Conversation which ensured that they did not just gossip, but discussed what was most important to them and how other people’s experience could help them, the verdicts have even gone to the extent of asserting that they would remain ‘eternally grateful’ for the encounter. The giant stores of today have flourished in the belief that the greater the variety of goods placed before customers, the more choice they have, the freer they are because they can choose for themselves, but people are ultimately more interested by people than by things. Loyalty cards and discounts are superficial remedies for frustrated sociability.

  IKEA is not just the blue-and-yellow buildings customers see, for it has many thousands of people manufacturing and supplying goods to it from numerous exotic countries, but it is silent about the sweat and tears and thoughts of the individual maker of each object it sells. A non-descript lampshade becomes more interesting, a messenger of unfulfilled hope when it is revealed that it is made in a factory in Delhi by one of 200 women, bent over a bench eight hours a day, dreaming about how their children could have ‘a better life’. The technology already exists to trace the origins of each item on sale, and it could easily be used to let the buyer see and talk to the maker, to express appreciation and to learn something of the skills used in the making. It is underestimating customers to assume that they are interested only in calculating whether the lampshade is cheap enough. And it is misunderstanding the suppliers to imagine that they want to talk only about prices and delivery dates.

  My exploratory trial in the IKEA superstore organised language lessons and conversation practice for foreigners and immigrants, not only providing a sympathetic audience for the extraordinary stories they had to tell and longed to pour out, but also enriching the customers’ understanding of suffering and resilience in other lands. Restless young children, dragged around behind parents worrying about what they can and cannot afford, found a more captivating role for themselves when they were offered lessons in playing the ukulele and singing to its tunes. A parking lot does not have to be dreary, predictable asphalt; it could become open-air art gallery, each space a part of a huge carpet of designs, surrounded by hanging gardens on the perimeter walls. As online commerce expands and shops increasingly resemble museums, where people come to touch the goods offered for sale more cheaply on the web, the theatre and dances of the civilis
ations from which the goods originate can change the whole idea of what a ‘shopping experience’ is. When shops recognise that they are potentially parts of the educational system and rivals of the entertainment industry, the commercial justification for allowing cultural activities to infiltrate them becomes evident. A store need not be just a temple of consumption worshipping deal-making; it also has a congregation of shoppers who have broader ideals of conviviality. In the same way that religious reformations have been the result of congregations combining new with old rituals, so combining education with commerce has the potential to give a different character to the consumer society.