FURNITURE giant Ikea is using memory-wiping gas to make customers forget how awful their visit has been, it was claimed yesterday.
Sources claim the company uses a scentless substance known as Skortl, administered at the checkout area, which obscures customers’ recollection of the horrors they have just experienced in the seemingly endless labyrinth of cheap objects.
Shopper Bill McKay said: “The last time we went to Ikea, I had a cold, but I was determined that our living room would not be fit for human consumption until I had installed a beech-veneered fjrkntruupel.
“As the hours passed – with no sign of the fjrkntruupel or an exit – the trolley filled with increasingly unnecessary items selected through a weird mix of panic and self-doubt until eventually we began to turn on each other.
“I made a deliberately antagonistic comment to my wife about how I’d rather ram broken glass up my own arse than ever ever ever fucking ever do this again, and then she punched me really hard in the windpipe. Meanwhile our eight-year-old son Robert responded by stabbing her repeatedly in the thigh with one of the little pencils they give you.
“Yet no sooner had we left the building, bleeding and ragged, than my wife was talking happily about how we didn’t really need another 47 bags of vanilla flavoured tea lights.
“It was then I remembered being sprayed in the face at the checkout by a yellow-shirted girl who laughed in our faces and called us ‘dreadful, bovine twats’. Clearly they didn’t count on my blocked sinuses.”
A spokesman for Ikea said said the company was pleased to announce the opening of its first British stores and looked forward to introducing millions of customers to a new shopping experience.
Retail analyst Stephen Malley said: “Memory gas doesn’t sound like the kind of thing Ikea would do, but then again I’ve never been there.”
He added: “By the way, can I just ask you something – is your house completely full of tea lights?”
