Krapea


CHECKOUT The line, the bitch and the wardrobe. If you make it this far with your sanity intact, the checkout is where we bring out the big guns. You're going to have to dig deep to get through this. The media portrays us as money-hungry monopolists but in fact we are happiest when someone leaves our store with no furniture, when they throw in the $3 towel. Our satisfaction lies in pushing the consumer over the edge, in testing the thresholds of pain and frustration. It's a Swedish thing. The checkout area is like a scene from a refugee camp. The lines are longer than the latest ride at an amusement park on a Saturday afternoon. People are crying and banging their heads on walls. The weak are trampled under foot. The floor is a marshland of cardboard and human waste. You've developed an irrational hatred for your fellow man. Now, you are melancholy. High-school dropouts at the cash register talk to you like you have a mental retardation. Your emotional breakdown is complete. By the time you realize that you've been in our store for two days, your cash will already be winging its way to a tax haven.

EXIT BISTRO
You will know when you are reaching the end of your epic journey when you spot a condiment bar covered in flies and baby sick. By 10 AM, the Exit Bistro looks like the aftermath of a frat party. You've beaten your children, your marriage is over and you've lost the will to live. But two hotdogs for a dollar? Come on, that's enough to cheer anyone up! Mind you, you will have to assemble them yourselves. We provide you with some pig snouts, discarded entrails and a synthetic, cellulose casing in a flat cardboard box.

LOAD UP THE CAR
You emerge into the outside world with a slipped disc, wincing at the natural light that has eluded you for so long. Now all you have to do is load your furniture into the truck. Wait, you don't have a truck? We always have the last laugh. All our products are designed to be slightly too big to fit into a normal-sized car. It's just the KRAPEA way. You jam the boxes into the trunk as best you can and lash them with some of the useless twine that the cashier threw at you before spitting in your face. It's easier to break out of a maximum security prison than it is to get out of a KRAPEA parking lot but, after two hours of circling around and driving down dead-end lanes, you will find the exit and come to a standstill, ready to sit for a final hour of highway gridlock. You wonder why we're so relaxed. We accept our fate. How we laugh, and then we are melancholy! We are rich, but still there is no sun for 6 months. It is a lonely planet. Nothing is sadder than other people laughing.

SELF-ASSEMBLY
You slipped over a piece of bubble wrap, your shins are raw to the bone and you're still wincing from that sugar-crazed infant running headfirst into your gonads. But you're home... blissfully unaware that you will soon be driving back out into the wilderness to begin a frustrating and ultimately fruitless petition for missing purchases and damaged parts. All our marketing is designed to fool you into thinking that KRAPEA furniture is easy to assemble. It is, in fact, a Mensa application. If you're lucky, you will find a scrap of paper in your packaging with some rudimentary hieroglyphics. At KRAPEA, we believe in instructions without words. This way, we can use the same assembly guide in every country around the world and pay bigger bonuses to our senior executives. The pictures are drawn by the toddlers who get lost in our stores. We tried written instructions in England once but they couldn't stop laughing at the word 'flange'.

Now, we need to make a couple of things clear about KRAPEA furniture:

- Some critical parts will always be missing. If you need 40 screws, we will give you 20. Life is hard in northern Europe and you need to learn that.
- We hide the pre-drilled holes so that you have to feel your way along a panel like a blind person reading Braille, looking for slight bumps in the surface.
- We drill the holes in the wrong place and at different heights so that your furniture ends up looking like something on a stage in a high-school play.
- The tacky veneer finish will chip so much during assembly that it will look like the target of a drive-by shooting by the time you've finished.
- You will put it together wrong. Twice. Now you really feel like you are on the northern plains of existence.

Just as you start to make some headway with the assembly, Krapea Kramp sets in from the strain of forcing hundreds of screws into undersized holes and your hand is rendered useless for a couple of days. You have more calluses than a pervert in a peepshow. Finally, with wooden dowels glued to your fingers, you try to take your own life but you can't even do that right. Our work is done.