if i only knew...

Liking IKEA & Starbucks is OK

Finally, someone said it. It is OK to like Starbucks and IKEA. There are so many rants about why Starbucks is evil and IKEA is evil, and so on, it's sort of become trendy to bash them, even if people are actually frequent customers in the two institutions.
I have said this before, but this post: Ikeaphobia and its discontents inspired me to say it again: I like Starbucks and I LOVE IKEA and i am not ashamed by it! :)

If you're wondering why i like Starbucks: it's the ONLY place in Europe to get a Mocha and i am addicted to that stuff, and in Vienna where i frequent Starbucks, their coffee houses actually are very very comfortable, clean and serve good music, just what i like.

As for IKEA: I grew up behind the iron curtain, deprived of such capitalistic pleasures as well-designed furniture, so i was addicted to the german and austrian IKEA catalogs that friends and relatives brought back from trips to Western Europe. They were unbelievable eye-candy and "what's it like to live in a dream world" stuff for my Eastern-European, Socialist-Realist design surrounded self back then, and it's no surprise that i could identify most of the furniture by their goofy pseudo-Scandinavian names years before i was actually able to go to an IKEA store. And in addition to these fond childhood memories, i still think IKEA has great design and i love their products, as well as their clever marketing (not because i am a masochistic consumer but because i have a marketing degree so this stuff actually interests me!).