Why does IKEA ban wood hands with middle fingers?
In most parts of the world, giving the middle finger is considered an incivility.
But at IKEA in most parts of the world, the middle finger is more like a collective ritual representing the rebellious instinct of human beings.
Before going to IKEA, people tend to think that IKEA provides quality service and gives consumers patience and respect.
Until they visited in person, lost themselves in the huge dungeon maze, and every time they looked up, they could see the neat hand model in the store, which was mercilessly mocking themselves-
Those who will be offended by this scene are undoubtedly IKEA newcomers.
When you go more, you will not only gradually master the IKEA maze map, but you will also get used to the middle finger standing tall.
At IKEA, there are so many wooden hands with the middle finger that everyone who is new to the treasure land can mistakenly think that their factory settings are like this, and the Illuminati forces behind them are trying to summon some mysterious force.
I have to be a genius who pretends to be confused, and I know that I can't package this as a bizarre urban legend, because everyone who visits IKEA knows that the cause of this phenomenon is no different from crop circles:
You did it yourself.
How many customers on social media have questioned the middle finger gesture of the IKEA wooden hand – and correspondingly, how many customers have poised their freshly completed IKEA finger masterpiece.
IKEA'S WOODEN HAND MODEL, OFFICIALLY KNOWN AS "HANDSKALAD", HAS BEEN POPULAR AROUND THE WORLD FOR YEARS AND IN SEVERAL VERSIONS AS ONE OF THE HOME GIANT'S FIST PRODUCTS.
Consumers have always been praised for its high mobility, and the hand model has been developed for a variety of functions: from the earliest living room ornaments, to table stands, to hand painting references.
IKEA's decision to place these hand models in conspicuous places in offline stores is also very clear: to let consumers perceive their practicality and playability from zero distance through personal interaction, so as to increase consumers' desire to buy.
It's just that at first, no one thought that when the hand molds were put on the public shelf, their final form would be so neat, as if it was a natural law for the wooden hand model to raise the middle finger.
If there is only one IKEA in the world, we can still attribute it to the overall poor quality of the inhabitants of the region.
But when a similar phenomenon happens at any IKEA anywhere in the world, you should react: it has become a problem for all humanity.
As early as 2021, when the world has not become so bad, the IKEA store in Shanghai's Baoshan District was reported by customers to affect the appearance of the city, and should be sentenced to expulsion from Shanghai:
On foreign social media, IKEA clerks from all over the world also told the same troubles in related posts:
"I spend more than half my day pushing these damn middle fingers back."
"Ten minutes – this is the time I spend walking through my work area at peak traffic, and it's also the cycle of my middle finger recovery."
"It's no different than my job at the Apple Experience Store, where my main job every day is to delete those stupid selfies over and over again!"
The IKEA clerk kept breaking the hand model back into place, like Sisyphus pushing in vain against a boulder that rolled down a mountain again and again.
This is tantamount to a punishment for every clerk working in an IKEA store, but artificial recovery is indeed the easiest way to think of and the fastest way to achieve results.
Obviously, this approach will do little to curb similar indecent acts and may even be counterproductive.
Because the "criminal" who puts up the middle finger of the hand model again and again is not the same person, but every passerby who has eaten enough and has nothing to do.
When the employee reconstructs these hand models, for the next patient with itchy hands, fiddling with these five-fingered models becomes a new creative experience.
In this way, everyone has the opportunity to consider themselves a rebel in their own right, and then once again put the hand model into a daily pose that they are proud of.
Until this simple and crude solution is posted online, people will finally discover:
Their practice of erecting the middle finger of the hand model has nothing to do with rebellion, and can only be regarded as a kind of local custom.
The middle finger is the most emotive of all hand movements.
You can imagine everyone who breaks the finger of a wooden hand, maybe they want to express rebellion, vent bad feelings, or just want to amuse the people around them - well, it's a knee-jerk inertial decision.
In dealing with the matter of hand molds giving up the middle finger, explicitly prohibiting people from transforming hand molds into low-quality symbols is the solution that should not be considered.
Because when IKEA decided to publicly display these movable models in the store, it had clearly delegated the creative rights to everyone. If you apply rules and restrictions on this premise, it is equivalent to being what you want to set up and what you want.
But since the problem has arisen, it still needs to be solved after all.
In the past two years, many IKEA stores have adopted another set of new ideas, they have limited the play of the middle finger in a simpler and crude way:
If you want people to be free to create, but you want to restrict some of their creative freedom, the most direct way is naturally to cut down some of the themes you don't want to appear in one fell swoop.
And as long as the mind is open, there are many ways to erase the middle finger from the creation. Tied, nailed, or even removed the middle finger directly are all options.
If properly disposed of, it can even render like a work of art that is already there.
The various ways to lock the middle finger actually show that IKEA has completely lost confidence in the quality level and creativity of its customers.
At the moment, the immobilized or removed middle finger is more of a grand provocation – I know you're going to do it, but you just can't.
Judging from today's situation, IKEA never imagined that these hand models would be used so widely in this way.
Objectively speaking, no large chain supermarket for the whole population will be willing to fill its stores with daily middle fingers, and this matter has indeed brought a lot of trouble to the staff, and it is understandable to find a way to solve the problem.
But what if the IKEA hand model was thought of as an interactive art that had been planned in advance? I think it has also completed the most ideal journey of contemporary art.
Source: Little Red Book @KOUJIA
In the beginning, it may simply be used to prove that everyone has a creative desire in their daily lives.
Later, it proved that most people who think they are unconventional don't really have creative ideas.
Finally, the "excessive" decentralization of creative rights has aroused a high level of alarm among those involved, who have completed this ostensibly out-of-control satirical art by restricting, tampering with, and even canceling.
The middle finger and even the ring finger are locked, leaving everyone with quite limited creative space.
So now, can we call IKEA the "capital of rock and roll"?