Hide and seek in IKEA
Published 7:00 am Tuesday, March 17, 2015
Your friend starts counting to 100, prompting you and the rest of the group split up in search of the best possible spot.
After spending more than half the allotted time picking out just the right location, you wait in anticipation to see if your pick is better than all the rest.
As the minutes tick by your heart beats rapidly from a mixture of exhilaration, anticipation and elation.
But alas, only a short time into the game, you are discovered.
If this game sounds familiar, it is.
In fact just about everyone has played hide and seek as a child, but have you ever considered playing it as an adult, with other adults, in a major retailer?
Ikea stores in the Netherlands allowed hundreds of people to play the childhood game in their stores last summer.
The thing is, it will be the last time.
After allowing 500 people to run through the store and hide in appliances, under shopping bags and in the storage spaces under beds, Ikea has put the kibosh on future hide and seek events at their stores.
It’s understandable that they would want to protect themselves as a corporation.
Especially when people are hiding in refrigerators.
What this story actually sheds light on is not that people enjoy reliving their childhood, but there’s a business opportunity here.
Such a business could not only include mock living and bed rooms for people to hide in, but any other scenario they choose.
The setting could even rotate on a regular basis to keep things fresh. Additionally, instead of just hide and seek, participants could be given harmless firearms, and try to shoot the most people in a given time frame.
Oh wait, I just described laser tag and paintball.