A new fad that has people hiding out in IKEA stores overnight and walking out the next morning has left the Swedish retailer less than amused.
In Europe, pranksters seeking a thrill have followed in the footsteps of Bram Geirnaert and Florian van Hecke, two Belgian students who filmed and posted on YouTube a video clip about the night they spent last summer at an IKEA store in Ghent, Belgium.
Their video, entitled Two idiots at night in IKEA, has been viewed 1.7 million times — fewer than their British counterparts “Carnage” and “LordOmar,” who have made a name for themselves by spending 24 clandestine hours in stadiums, zoos, movie theaters and theme parks, and whose stay at a British IKEA has garnered 2.3 million views.
Photo: Reuters
“We were thinking about something crazy we could do after we graduated from high school,” Geirnaert said.
Hiding out for hours each in a separate cramped display wardrobe, the two ventured out into the showroom once they were sure the cleaning staff had gone for the night.
“We didn’t go too far inside the store because we didn’t want to risk being caught by a motion sensor,” Geirnaert said.
Crawling under the covers of a large bed, “we were too nervous to really fall asleep. With every sound of the wind or every noise we heard we were wide awake again,” he said.
When the store opened the next morning, Geirnaert and Van Hecke coolly walked through the aisles to the exit, as unwitting sales staff greeted them and thanked them for their visit — but others have not been so lucky.
“Carnage” and “LordOmar” were caught by a night watchman, as were two teenage girls in the southern Swedish town of Jonkoping on Saturday last week.
The underage girls will not be prosecuted, but future trespassers may not be so fortunate, IKEA spokesman Jakob Holmstrom said.
“We hope we’ve seen the beginning of the end” of this “overrated” craze, Holmstrom said, insisting the prank is hardly worth the effort. “It’ll be a long night of sitting still, only to then get in trouble with the law.”
At its almost 400 stores worldwide, the company has been targeted by about 1,300 clandestine night visitors, Swedish police investigator Lars Forstell told the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter.
However, Holmstrom said IKEA roundly rejects that number.
“We have no overall global number, but we have had significantly fewer incidents than 1,300. If we look at Sweden, we have had four cases at 20 stores,” he said.
Meanwhile, Geirnaert and Van Hecke said they are not encouraging others to break the law.
“IKEA didn’t personally contact us, we only read in the newspaper that they thought it was funny once, but they didn’t want other people to try it,” Geirnaert said.
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