TORONTO – IKEA wants people to stop playing hide-and-seek in its Dutch stores.
As Bloomberg points out, more than 32,000 people have signed up for Facebook event to play a huge game of hide-and-seek at the IKEA Eindhoven location and another 19,000 have signed up for a game in Amsterdam and 12,000 for one in Utrecht.
“It’s hard to control,” IKEA Group spokeswoman Martina Smedberg told Bloomberg. “We need to make sure people are safe in our stores and that’s hard to do if we don’t even know where they are.”
Apparently, the trend of playing the childhood game in a furniture store began in Belgium.
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IKEA granted permission for one game of hide-and-seek in its Wilrijk store after 29-year-old Elise De Rijck put it on her list of 30 things to do before her 30th birthday, Bloomberg reported.
“Sometimes it’s fun just to do some childish things,” De Rijck said. “IKEA is like an extremely large living room.”
A few hide-and-seek events at Canadian locations have popped up on Facebook. Invites for these events (in Calgary and Edmonton) are much smaller with less than 100 invites sent.
IKEA Canada said it hasn’t been contacted by organizers asking for permission to host an event.
“At the end of the day, the priority for IKEA is to ensure the safety of everyone in our building and the uninterrupted operation of our business,” Madeleine Löwenborg-Frick, a spokesperson for IKEA Canada, said in a statement. “If any external group is interested in hosting an event at IKEA, they will have to be in contact with the local store who will then make that determination.”
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