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The screw-it-yourself store comes through!

By Ed Goldman

If I’m feeling a little giddy—but also wary at the same time—please forgive me. 

What happened is this: I received an unexpected windfall check the other day from an entity calling itself Richardson v. IKEA Claims Adjuster. That’s the giddy part. The wary part is that I now expect relatives I’ve never met, as well as creditors I’ve been able to avoid, to camp on my doorstep in the hope I’ll soon be sharing my bonanza with them. 

No chance of it, folks. That $25.04 is going right into my savings account, where I expect it to earn 0.57 percent interest starting immediately. This means that just 12 months from today, that $25.04 could well grow to $26.47. If I’m rounding up a tad, blame my delirium.

My first thought when my ship came in was that the $25.04 represented IKEA’s first payment to purchase of an idea I’d sent to the company sometime back. It was for something I called the IPS: Ikea Positioning System—to be deployed whenever a consumer got lost in the massive store whose layout and way-finding system were designed, I’m convinced, by Satan.

But no. According to print as tiny and indecipherable as you might find on, say, the instructions to assemble an IKEA bookcase, “If you made a purchase at an IKEA retail location using a credit card or debit card between October 18, 2017 and December 31, 2019, you may be entitled to benefits under a class action settlement.”

Those who sued the DIY/LYM (do-it-yourself/lose-your-mind) retail giant”) charged that IKEA “printed receipts for credit or debit card transactions at its retail locations that included more than the last 5 digits of the debit or credit card number.” This would be “in violation of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act,” it was further alleged. 

As a result, IKEA agreed to pay out more than $24 million bucks to those of us whose privacy was compromised and, even worse, had their feathers ruffled. IKEA, of course, admitted no blame. If so, I’m not sure why it unloaded all that dough. Maybe it was the company’s way of apologizing for its assembly instructions.

Math, as we’ve learned, is not my strong suit. (Not even the suits in my closet are strong. For instance, they don’t seem to resist shrinking every year after the holidays.) But to put this into something resembling perspective, my check for $25.04 equaled .00010433 of the total settlement.

I know what you’re thinking: Why not share the largesse at my fingertips with a charity, nonprofit arts group or social services agency—one of those that tell me, “For just 14 cents a day, you’ll be feeding and providing clean sheets for 17,000 dwarf hamsters”?

Well, I can be as charitable as the next guy—provided the next guy’s first name isn’t Ebenezer. But really: Wouldn’t my suggested invention, the Ikea Positioning System, benefit more people in the long run? 

Can we even begin to calculate how many people are, right at this moment, desperately trying to make their way through an IKEA store in search of the checkout line, a non-gender bathroom or its legendary Swedish-meatball concession?

My IPS could locate not only those El Dorados but also your Cadillac El Dorado, which you left somewhere far, far away long, long ago in the IKEA parking lot (alternate name: hellscape). It could help you find a salesperson who actually knows how to get you from the office furniture section to bedroom furniture section using one of the store’s arcane shortcuts: 

“See the sign for the marketplace? There’s an unmarked door there which’ll take you to the self-serve warehouse. From there, it’s just a few thousand yards to the showroom.”

“But we’re standing in the showroom.”