Relocating yourself halfway around the world with a limited amount of space to bring your lives along and attempting to settle into an unfurnished furnished apartment means that you need to buy a crap load of stuff. As we left Issaquah, divesting ourselves of all our worldly possessions (car, house, etc) and packed away the rest of our lives into storage I became a bit disenchanted by all that we possess and the consumerism in our society. And yet here in Beijing we end up buying all over again.<\/p>\n
This particular buying experience though does feel a bit different. First of all we are spending an allowance given us by our landlord to outfit our house with furniture. The basic kind of furniture you need to outfit a house with : sofa, shelves, tables, chairs, beds etc. These are not extravagant or lavish, but practical and “necessary”. Secondly we are buying all the outfitting things that are required for living that we didn’t have room to bring : towels, knives, forks, plates, spoons, cups, bowls, paper towels, garbage bags, dishwasher soap, detergent, hand soap, colander, spatula, pots, pans, skillet etc.<\/p>\n
Buying all this stuff takes a lot of time. It requires a lot of work. And it pretty much sucks. So far we’ve made three big purchasing trips and two of the three have been at Ikea. The one not at Ikea was at Carrefour, which is a French – Chinese-ified Target\/grocery store. There is a Carrefour one near our house and the basement floor is all non-food stuff and the main floor is a full on grocery store. Miles, Sofi and I spent a couple of hours this week pushing and filling two carts full of household sundries this week before both of them had lack-of-food-meltdowns and we left. We bought :<\/p>\n
Two big shopping carts full and it cost me around $300 US. Then there is Ikea.<\/p>\n
First off let me comment on variable costs.\u00c2\u00a0 Over the course of my employment at Amazon I’ve gotten to learn a lot about the way a business is run.\u00c2\u00a0 Fixed costs are those expenditures that don’t vary over time (duh), like the cost of building a new building, or say the cost of Ikea building a huge warehouse.\u00c2\u00a0 Variable costs are those expenditures that vary (duh) over the course of time, often due to seasonality or other factors, the prime example of this is labor.\u00c2\u00a0 So the variable cost to run say for example an Ikea are the costs of the employees.\u00c2\u00a0 Ikea saves a crap load of variable costs because they have somehow convinced you and I to “pay” for the labor of walking around and picking out all the furniture and furnishings from the shelves in their warehouse and<\/strong> they have convinced us that we should also “pay” to put it together.\u00c2\u00a0 This is for example why the online grocery business is hard because the same thing applies to grocery shopping; the grocery store doesn’t have to pay someone to pick all the items off the shelf for you, you do it yourself. But if you purchase groceries on line they now have to pay someone to do this for you.<\/p>\n Anyway all of this goes to say that a trip to Ikea can be long and tiring because they construct the building in a maze like fashion where to get from the beginning to where you purchase you have to walk past everything<\/strong> so that you’ll have a chance to see everything<\/strong> you need<\/strong> to buy. And then<\/strong> after you have picked it out you have to push big carts around lugging it off the shelves to the check out stand.\u00c2\u00a0 Take this typical Ikea experience and quadruple the size of the building and place this in a city of 25 million people where you get literally 1000s of people all shopping at the same time and the maze can turn into a slow agonizing game of dodge-the-1000s-of-slow-people-in-my-way.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 And it really is huge. The Beijing Ikea is three stories, each one massive with a really long circuitous route that winds around back and forth like a snake.<\/p>\n You park underground, which itself is three levels deep.\u00c2\u00a0 You ascend on an angled moving walkway to the main level and then ascend three stories on a series of escalators to the top floor.\u00c2\u00a0 Now your trapped in the maze. The only way down and out is to make your way through the maze on each floor.\u00c2\u00a0 The top floor you can only use those little stupid cart things with the bags you hang on them, which seem to really be a strange device to wheel your tired kids around. You basically make one big circle.\u00c2\u00a0 This top floor doesn’t really have anything you can carry anyway, its all large furniture display with a few accessories sprinkled here and there.\u00c2\u00a0 You pick out the furniture and the color you want (if there are covers) and then get those cryptic location codes : aisle 7, location 21, item 801.732.94.\u00c2\u00a0 At the end of the maze is a set of stairs, where you can’t take the little carts down, and you have to carry your bag.\u00c2\u00a0 The 2nd floor has “real” shopping carts and is full of all those things you can actually put in a shopping cart, like kitchen ware, bedding etc.\u00c2\u00a0 Then you take your shopping cart and you make your way down two huge long angled moving walkways that take you to the main level where the warehouse aisles and items are stored and you can pay and check out.<\/p>\n One note about the carts over here and these angled moving walkways.\u00c2\u00a0 The carts have all four wheels free. Usually in the States the rear wheels are fixed and the two front wheels can freely turn, but in China all four wheels can turn in any direction.\u00c2\u00a0 This makes it very difficult to maneuver them with in a straight line let alone a predictable fashion; get going too fast in one direction and it requires a lot of inertia to turn the cart as the thing spins out of control. There are no rear wheels to help you steer and control the direction.\u00c2\u00a0 This doesn’t sound too bad until you put one of these carts in the hands of 100s of people all trying to maneuver around on another; or you put the cart in the hands of a 7 year old boy who has<\/strong> to drive and has no concept of velocity.\u00c2\u00a0 When you wheel these carts onto the moving walkways their wheels lock into grooves and they are held stationary on the walkway as you ascend or descend.\u00c2\u00a0 This free-wheeled aspect gets really<\/strong> difficult when you arrive on the main floor and are picking out your heavy items and you end up with an unwieldy cart that weighs several hundred pounds. Its like pushing an elephant around the ice rink.<\/p>\n We made one recon trip to Ikea, before we had any money.\u00c2\u00a0 (The landlord had yet to pay us the furniture allowance, work had yet to pay me because I didn’t have a bank account and it wasn’t payday, and we had a foreign credit card which most places don’t take with a daily maximum $400 withdrawal limit.)\u00c2\u00a0 This involved two hours of wandering through the maze, taking lots of photos of furniture displays and writing down codes and prices.\u00c2\u00a0 We made another trip back the following Saturday for actual purchase. When we arrived at the checkout we were four carts deep. Two shopping carts piled high with beddings and kitchen furnishings and two large flat carts with furniture good piled high. \u00c2\u00a0 After our purchase we made our way to home delivery where they arranged to deliver all the big stuff for 100 rmb and offered me the option to have everything assembled for another 350 rmb.\u00c2\u00a0 Yes! I wouldn’t have to through the no-words-pictographic-assembly-pain!<\/p>\n We still had a bunch more furniture to purchase and ton of bathroom and kitchen supplies. So I steeled myself for yet another Ikea trip.\u00c2\u00a0 This last week the kids had homework and Stac wasn’t feeling like going out so we divided and conquered. She stayed home and took care of them and I agreed to go shopping at Ikea by myself.\u00c2\u00a0 Thus began the 4 hours of shopping hell.<\/strong><\/p>\n I arrived at 5:30pm on a Thursday.\u00c2\u00a0 Should be a quiet night at Ikea right? Not really there were just as many people as the two other Saturdays we’d gone. I first headed to the top floor and before beginning the maze I went to the cafeteria for a plate of Swedish meatballs, some gravy and potatoes.\u00c2\u00a0 Then I began. I bought another chair for the front room and an entertainment stand. Then I bought a kitchen table and chairs and a desk and chair for Sofi. And finally two mattress pads for our and Miles bed.\u00c2\u00a0 (Chinese beds tend to run on the rock solid hard side of things). Then down to level two where I grabbed a cart and started filling it with all kids of kitchen supplies and towels.\u00c2\u00a0 One of the purchases was a set of kitchen knives. There was a girls standing near the knives with a black book.\u00c2\u00a0 When I’d made my selection she grabbed me and had me fill in my mobile number and print my name. Apparently any blades over 15 cms requires you to register your purchase of deadly implements with the police. I was also instructed to not carry these on public transportation.\u00c2\u00a0 I guess I was now armed and dangerous.<\/p>\n Then the long descent down the walkway to the main level. The only problem was I had one cart piled high with everything. There was no way I could manage this cart and what I feared with be two more big flat carts of heavy furniture.\u00c2\u00a0 So I called Robert, our”translator” guy who comes with our driver to have our driver, Mr. Wang come meet me and help me.\u00c2\u00a0 (We get a driver for the first 2 months to help us get settled in. While he drives me crazy cause he drives sooooo<\/strong> slow, I couldn’t imagine doing all of this without him).\u00c2\u00a0 I had told Robert to have Mr. Wang meet me at the ice cream. No cell service in the basement meant Robert had to call Mr. Wang on the loud speaker. I nervously paced back and forth between the ice cream area outside the checkstands and my full cart back behind them.\u00c2\u00a0 After 20 minutes Mr. Wang finally got the message and showed up.<\/p>\n We convinced some Ikea workers to keep an eye on my full cart and we headed out to the aisle\/location\/numbers to pick out the furniture.\u00c2\u00a0 We piled one cart so high with furniture that it got heavy enough to engage the breaking mechanisms on the wheels and we had to get a second large flat cart to carry everything.\u00c2\u00a0 Finally done we pushed everything into line, 3 carts deep to check out.\u00c2\u00a0 The Chinese respect for lines is more than some I’ve seen but at the same time not very strict either.\u00c2\u00a0 We had one lady try to but in line in between the clerk checking all the items in cart one and carts two and three.\u00c2\u00a0 Mr. Wang straightened her out.\u00c2\u00a0 Checking all the furniture out is tedious because the clerk has to find the scannable bar codes on each box and check them off. Finally complete, Mr. Wang and I attempted to push three heavy free wheeling carts through the milling crowds of ice cream and hot dog eaters to the home delivery line.<\/p>\n We dutifully queued in a line that was two abreast at one of the home delivery stations.\u00c2\u00a0 We were the 5th person in line.\u00c2\u00a0 After a while the first person was finished and then number 2 got started.\u00c2\u00a0 This guy was crazy angry about something; him and the delivery clerk went on and on and on yelling at each other for forever.\u00c2\u00a0 Finally after 10 minutes the guy just ahead of me (#4) went up and complained.\u00c2\u00a0 They got a manager guy from the back to carry on the yelling with the angry #2 guy. Then the number 3 started getting processed and Mr. #4 switched over to the adjacent lane.\u00c2\u00a0 While we waited for our turn I ended up having to defend and deflect at least 3-4 other people who tried to cut in line.\u00c2\u00a0 Finally 45 minutes later we were up and the delivery clerk started processing my order.\u00c2\u00a0 Sadly it was now I noticed that the entertainment stand, which\u00c2\u00a0 had two book shelves on either sides were not the same color. This involved a 15 minute delay while the delivery guy called on the phone and Mr. Wang and an Ikea employee went and switched out the box for the right color.\u00c2\u00a0 FINALLY<\/strong> an hour after checking out and 4 hours<\/strong> after arriving at Ikea we loaded the rest of the stuff up in the car and we headed for “home”. Usually I would have dropped everything off at our new permanent apartment, but I was too tired and had Mr. Wang drop me off at our temporary hotel\/apartment.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 What a long tortuous evening. And what made it all that much bitter was I imagine we will have to go to Ikea at least twice more to keep on buying that stuff we need to live.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Relocating yourself halfway around the world with a limited amount of space to bring your lives along and attempting to settle into an unfurnished furnished apartment means that you need to buy a crap load of stuff. As we left Issaquah, divesting ourselves of all our worldly possessions (car, house, etc) and packed away the … Continue reading