As I write, something called Black Week is going on all around me. It used to be Black Friday, which always struck me as an odd name. After all, Black Monday involved a major stock market crash. So why would you want to make such a doom-laden analogy? Whatever. I expect there are also Black Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and for all I know Black Sabbaths, so why not bundle the lot into a package?
To sum up, in case it had passed you by, we in the Western world live in a consumer society. And the rest of the planet would like to.
So it’s only appropriate that we should worship at the altar of the shop.
It wasn’t always like this, of course. I’m old enough to remember living in Britain in the backwash of the Second World War, with rationing so fresh in the mind that frugality was second nature to most people.
True, rationing ended with meat becoming free-range in 1954, the year before I was born. And with it died the ration book – in some cases on communal autos-da-fé, I imagine. But somehow the fact seemed to have escaped the notice of my parents. Or at least, that of my father who doled out a pittance each week to my mother for the ‘housekeeping’. So I guess I was brought up on the minimum nutritional allowance the backroom boys had estimated necessary for survival. The result was that I was a puny youth that grew into a stunted adult.
But say what you will, nothing went to waste. Instead it was infinitely recycled. Not even in an upward direction, since I spent much my childhood in my older female cousin’s hand-me-downs, which was particularly embarrassing on visits to the beach, where I was invariably the only boy wearing a bikini. (actually a girl’s one-piece swimsuit, but ‘bikini’ sounded more fun.)
Nowadays of course, the reverse is true. (What, I wonder is the reverse of a bikini? A monokini?) We live in a world where pretty much everything you buy has a best-before date; only with supposedly non-perishable items are manufacturers not obliged to divulge that date to the consumer. As a result, you can expect your T-shirts to self-destruct after only one season in the sun, and your long-lasting LED serially-connected lights to go on the blink in sync with your eyes.
You can’t entirely blame the producers. We’ve become so attuned to economic prosperity that we’ve become (guilty) party to the crime. So we take it that food should be chucked, even if it’s still clearly eatable (because we have lost our sense of smell), and clothes should be disposed of, even if they’re still capable of covering the naughty bits (because they are no longer of the season).
‘What’s all this got to do with Sweden?’ you might ask.
When I first arrived here in 1991, ‘very little’ would have been the answer. Shops opened late and closed early. On Saturday they were open only half the day and Sunday not at all. But soon after my arrival, the opening hours were liberalised. Now it’s only provincial non-food shops that open so late and only the Swedish alcohol monopoly stores, Systemet, that are by law required to close on the Sabbath – and even they no longer close for lunch.
Whether this earlier state of affairs led to a less consumerist lifestyle and mind-set, I can’t say. You certainly had to plan farther ahead, and if you worked full-time, this could be tricky and occasionally infuriating. Still, it served to concentrate the mind. You tended to keep milk until it no longer moved in the bottle before throwing it out. And after spending 4 years living and working in the Soviet Union, I was just grateful for what I got.
But things have changed.
Here too the shop has become a demi-god, worshipped even (or especially) through the holidays.
By now, you may be guessing that I’m going to talk about IKEA. But that would be too obvious. The success story of an enterprising Smålander with Nazi sympathies is too well-known now to be of interest to our readers, thirsty as they ever are after new and esoteric facts about Sweden. Indeed I won’t even be staying in Småland, the most inventive part of the country by some accounts. (If you ever visited the province, you would realise how little else there is to do there.)
Instead we will be moving our attention westwards to the tiny province of Halland, where there isn’t much more to do, but at least it has a coastline, if you are into lying on beaches and that sort of thing. It also has a village called Ullared. This does not lie on the coast. It is situated bang in the middle of nowhere. But it was here in 1963 another enterprising chap (this time with no Nazi sympathies, as far as I know) called Göran Karlsson founded a company called Gekås (formed from his initials and pronounced ‘gaycoarse’).
Previously, GK had pursued a career in a town north of the village, approximating more or less to that of hawker, pedlar and all-purpose wide boy. Using the contacts he had made during his previous incarnations, he bought a property and filled it with bargain basement products of whatever kind he could find. It took a while, but eventually the place began to attract custom, so he moved first to the old station house in Ullared. Then when the local chrome factory went belly-up, he bought the premises and in the process a whole load more floor space.
The store, if you can call it that (‘behemoth’ will do otherwise), still occupies the old plant, but has been expanded on a number of occasions, so that now the ‘store’ and warehouse alone occupy something over 100, 000 square metres. There’s more to that figure than meets the eye, however, as I’ll explain later.
To say the business has been a success story would be a mammoth understatement. Today, if you say you are going to Ullared, it means you are going shopping, most obviously at Gekås. The village itself has, at the last count, 3000 inhabitants. On a good day (well, a record day), Gekås has nearly 30,000 visitors, with queues to enter that stretch about four kilometres. Reputedly it’s the largest store in the world. It’s definitely the fifth largest retailer in Sweden in terms of turnover, behind firms like IKEA and H&M. But unlike them, this is on the basis of only one outlet. There is even an ongoing docu-soap about the store and its employees and customers.
I’m not sure how Ullared’s other residents feel about this. As far as I’m concerned, it’d be a good reason to emigrate. But fair’s fair. The emporium must have brought prosperity to the sleepy little hamlet. It’s certainly brought employment, if working at a cash desk or in a warehouse is your idea of a fun job. Actually these days, that’s pretty much the only job going in many parts of the western hemisphere. Indeed, since the shop in high season employs nearly 2000 people, it’s hard to see what other kind of job might be available in Ullared.
And we haven’t even mentioned yet the Gekås slipstream effect. Much of the old village has now been torn down to make way for a massive retail hub jumping on the Gekås bandwagon.
But for me, what’s most striking about all this, and what strikes me as a particularly Swedish oddity is that people actually enjoy all this. I mean, I like a good well-stocked food market as much as the next man. I can wander for minutes on end down the aisles checking out the produce before cashing out and hurrying home.
There is, however, little of the utilitarian or the gourmet about the average Gekås customer. They are not just popping down to the corner shop and getting a bargain into the bargain. To start with, to get to Ullared from pretty much anywhere makes a visit a day trip. Well OK, if that’s your idea of a day out, then all well and good. And why not while you’re at it, buy a year’s supply of Ajax. The prices are outstandingly cheap, and if you’ve got a big enough vehicle, the savings you make can justify say a 100km round trip no problem.
But many travel almost the length of Sweden to enjoy the pleasures of the store. Apparently the only provinces yet to provide customers are those in the Arctic Circle. Meanwhile, Gekås regularly receives visitors from the other side of the Baltic, the rest of Scandinavia (the Norwegians love the place), Germany and even the Czech Republic. For goodness sake.
Some of these come in specially arranged charter coaches, customised to maximise storage space. Others come in cars. But a large number come with caravans or in camper vans. For yes, Ullared has become a prime holiday destination. (So has IKEA for that matter.) At almost any time of year, but especially in the summer months, you can pass through the village and glance over at the bulging car park on one side of the road, and the camper and caravan park on the other, separated only by a road and a huge car wash. And not to worry if you don’t have the dosh to afford your own portable sleeping accommodation. Gekås now has a hotel, a motel, a huge camping site and a large number of chalets to rent to make your stay so much easier and enjoyable.
In the same spirit, the company has created custom-made and customer-oriented children’s playgrounds and bathing areas along the course of lovely River Ätran and its oxbow lakes. Needless to say, there are also restaurants, some of which are actually not owned and run by Gekås.
To give you an idea of the scale of the enterprise, there is free parking space for over 3000 vehicles, 100 places for campers and caravans, 40 camping places (with facilities) 150+ double rooms in the hotel/ motel, and God knows how many chalets. All of which corresponds to a whole lot of overnight accommodation and a whole lot of space. I have no figures to go by, but it looks to me that Gekås and its property has almost as large a footprint as the rest of residential Ullared put together. The store itself covers 44, 000 square metres – corresponding, as I calculate, to 440 football pitches. The local warehouses take up as much space again, with the main outlying storage area occupying twice the acreage.
I’d love to be able to give you the number of football pitches the whole enterprise would cover, simply because that appears to be the in-thing to do. But I can’t. I can, however, point out that Ullared also has a football pitch and a team that plays in Division IV, which given the odd way that Swedish football is divided up means more or less Division VII. Naturally enough, its main sponsor is Gekås.
So it’s not just the shopping that helps people get their rocks off. What’s more, by all accounts those waiting in the interminable queues actually enjoy it – as if they are buying into the whole experiential package. I suppose it’s not often in Sweden that one has a captive audience for socialising. As for me, I’d happily walk four km to avoid a queue. But that’s just me. I spent too long working in the good old USSR, I guess.
I’m not being kind, I know that. It’s not really in my nature.
Let me try to be nice.
The holidaymaking shoppers are not doing anyone any harm. Unlike those that buy a new designer wardrobe every season, they need and will use all they buy. And anything that gets Swedes to talk to perfect strangers has to be a good thing.
I’m still being nice, note. I just find it weird that anyone would want to spend their holidays in a car park, a queue or a megastore. Give me a hole in the head anytime.
On the other hand, they might reasonably ask why a superannuated short-sighted Englishman would prefer to spend much more money and free time walking miles to find a tiny bird, which was moreover, hiding very competently in a mass of undergrowth.
Good point.
Bye-bye.
(Usual thanks to wiki for the piki.)
Letters from Sweden 