A visit to the new IKEA museum reveals a tension at the heart of the company, between Swedish values of openness and tolerance, and a bid for global domination, argues Tom Cubbin in this Opinion column.

Most foreigners who have found their way to Älmhult ? a town of roughly 10,000 inhabitants in the Småland region of southern Sweden ? fall into one of two categories. They are either Germans who own holiday cottages vacated by an agricultural worker who emigrated to the USA before the war, or they work for IKEA, the world's largest furniture retailer, whose headquarters are located in this unassuming town.
The first purpose-built IKEA showroom opened in Älmhult in 1958. But in June 2016, the town unveiled a new attraction ? a new IKEA museum, housed inside the old showroom. Any visitor to such a corporate museum arrives willing to be seduced by a company to whom they have paid an entrance fee, in the hope that they can be included in the processes of corporate mythologising. IKEA is so important in many of our lives and we crave to be acquainted with a company whose products we know intimately. We sleep on them, cook with them and do other things in/with them. But to know the origins of IKEA's customs is to become a fully accepted family member.
IKEA is so important in many of our lives
For example, we are told how the ritual of transferring items from yellow to blue bags at the checkout emerged after customers in Hamburg began to take bags home with them, as they wer...