So, have any of you ever been in Ikea during a fire alarm?

We were shopping in an Ikea a year or so ago, in the furniture section. It’s just a bit past the entrance to “the maze”. A screeching fire alarm goes off. For about 10 minutes, everyone – including the Ikea employees – just ignore it and continue doing whatever. Then the Ikea employees start saying, “Please exit the store” or somesuch. That’s when I dawns on me that exiting the store is not as easy as it sounds. We could see no marked fire exits. The employees just said the “follow the arrows”.

Everyone knows how hard it is to get through an Ikea at the best of times. What about during a fire alarm? Well, I’m looking for the “shortcuts”, but they are not clearly marked. We do make it to a stairwell (I’ve been in this store a few times) and manage to avoid traversing the entire top and bottom floors. We’re faced with a pair of big doors marked, “Not an exit” or somesuch. We push through those doors and they dump us out at the front of the store, near the registers.

Now we’re at the front of the store, with no idea how to get out. Toward the front of the store, we see some exit doors. We try to push them open, but they’re blocked by carts on the outside. We finally get the carts pushed out of the way and people pour out into a small parking area. Note, that this Ikea has a parking garage under the store, so if the building were actually on fire, we’d be fucked because this second-level parking area we’re standing in is very close to the building and gives no easy exit to the ground and away from the building.

If there was actually a fire with smoke, people would have panicked and it would have been a deadly shit-show getting out.

Fuck going to that Ikea again.

If you feel crazy because you don’t fit in, it’s entirely possible you’re not the crazy one. It’s entirely possible a large portion of society is on another bender.

I found the book, “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” by Charles Mackay helpful.
It was first published in 1841, so it’s in the public domain and available online. I found my copy in a used bookstore for a $1.
Mackay documents many of the public manias that overtook society up to that point. He describes dozens of them and remember, his list stops in the mid-1800’s.
Being aware of this pattern helps me to realize that a large number of humans are highly illogical. It helps me to understand that yes, a large number of people can all go off the deep end. It’s not me, it’s them. Notably, I can’t do anything about it. All I can do is lie low and ride it out.