In cupboards, under beds, behind curtains – the hiding places in an Ikea branch are almost unlimited. In Glasgow, Scotland, 3000 people come together to play hide-and-seek in a furniture store. But the police stop the fun before it starts.
Playing hide-and-seek somehow loses its appeal within one’s own four walls as one grows older; after all, the number of hiding places decreases with increasing height and width. In the gigantic living landscape of an Ikea furniture store, things look completely different; the number of possible places seems to be huge here. Many people in Glasgow, Scotland, have also noticed this when they arranged to play hide-and-seek at Ikea on Facebook. Because as many as 3000 people were enthusiastic about the idea, in the end even the police had to come in.
Ikea pushes into the Internet and city centres
According to the Scottish news site Scotsman.com, police were called to the Ikea market last Saturday after employees of the shopping complex discovered a superlative hiding game thread on Facebook. More than 3,000 – mostly young people – had already announced in it that they were on their way to Ikea and would turn the furniture store into a gigantic playground.
After the furniture store contacted the police, they sent five officers and brought additional security personnel to reinforce the team. Groups of young people who, according to the police, looked as if they had come to play were sent away by the officers. The police officers were on site until the shop closed at 8 pm. According to the website, however, the influx of people decreased anyway, after the customer was spread on social media by the game’s cancellation.
“We appreciate that games in our stores seem attractive to some,” scotsman.com quotes Rob Cooper, manager of the Glasgow Ikea store. “However, we don’t allow this type of activity because we want to provide a safe environment and a relaxed shopping experience for our customers.”
By the way, the idea of hide-and-seek at Ikea is not new: there were already several such events in 2014. In Eindhoven, 32,000 Facebook users signed up for a campaign, in Amsterdam 19,000. Ikea banned the events in 2015. “We have to be sure that people are safe, and that’s hard if we don’t know where they are,” a company spokesperson explained the ban.