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Default Early supper us.

Lucretia Borgia wrote:

> On Wed, 12 May 2021 17:51:56 -0400, Dave Smith
> > wrote:
>
> >On 2021-05-12 5:25 p.m., jmcquown wrote:
> >> On 5/12/2021 12:04 PM, Ed Pawlowski wrote:
> >>> O
> >>> That is the dumbest commercial on TV. I'd never buy Progressive
> >>> insurance because they are so annoying.
> >>
> >> The telling part is you don't know what company the ad is actually for..
> >>

> >
> >
> >I have been impressed with the new Ikea ad, but, as good as it is, it
> >doesn't do anything to change my attitude about them charging $5 for
> >curb side pick up during the pandemic shut down. I have been doing lots
> >of online ordering with curbside pickup and never had to pay extra. I
> >guess it should not be surprising, considering their outrageous delivery
> >charges. They had a satellite store in the city where my son lives and
> >he had wanted to order some stuff. I can understand them charging to
> >delivery a house, but they wanted $75 to deliver it to the store where
> >he would have to pick it up.

> I watched a brilliant doc on Netflix, the series was called Broken and
> I think it was the second episode, on furniture. I'd never buy
> anything from Ikea now, starting from when a Swedish Nazi (their words
> not mine) founded it and he made plenty of effort to conceal that!
>
> They opened one of their first NA stores here in Dartmouth. It was
> very popular and busy, even on Mondays. Suddenly, claiming it wasn't
> making money they closed it. My cousins wife in Vancouver worked for
> them because she was Swedish and I asked her why they really left. She
> looked into it and got back to me to say they wanted to open in
> Connecticut and in the meantime felt they would close the Dartmouth
> store. So from then, way back in the mid 70s, I knew they were liars.
>
> They have re-opened here now a couple of years ago, but I haven't been
> to look.



I would never buy anything from them, it's just pretty ordinary stuff, and not sturdily built at that...

Another reason I'd disdain them is that they used East German political prison labour* to build their crap; Ikea was not alone, many West German companies were complicit:

[* an East German friend of mine attempted to escape in 1984 and was imprisoned...]

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-g...8AF0ZT20121116

NOVEMBER 16, 2012

IKEA apologizes for use of East German prison labor

"BERLIN (Reuters) - IKEA apologized on Friday for using the forced labor of political prisoners in communist East Germany to make some of its furniture during the 1980s.

Victims of the German Democratic Republics (GDR) Stasi secret police watched as a senior executive of the Swedish giant acknowledged for the first time that it had failed to act when rumors of prison labor emerged.

€œDespite IKEAs attempts in the 1980s to prevent the use of political prisoners in making its products in the GDR, political prisoners were used. As the representative of IKEA in Germany, I offer my deepest regrets to the victims,€ said Peter Betzel, the companys country manager.

Embarrassed by media reports IKEA, the worlds largest furniture retailer, launched an internal investigation a year ago into whether it had used forced labor in the GDR until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

It handed the investigation to auditors Ernst & Young in May to ensure greater objectivity.

The presentation of the report took place a few meters from Checkpoint Charlie, one of the landmarks of the division of Berlin during the Cold War, where former Stasi prisoners said they hoped the study would lead to financial compensation.

€œIts not about getting compensation just from IKEA but from all the companies who played a role in this,€ said 62-year-old Rainer Wagner. IKEA did not touch on the issue of compensation although it said it would consider funding further research into the whole issue of forced labor.

Wagner was jailed after attempting to flee the GDR in 1966 and was forced to work in a factory producing gas meters. Some of the firms involved were privatized after reunification, he said.

CHEAP LABOUR

Other former prisoners told of being thrown into isolation cells and fed on punishment rations for failing to reach productivity targets at factories working for Western companies, including IKEA and other household names.

Thousands of firms from then-West Germany and other Western countries subcontracted production to state-controlled firms behind the Iron Curtain, attracted by the low labor costs.

IKEAs investigation was prompted by Swedish and German news media reports that included interviews with former Stasi prison inmates. Some reports said there was evidence of the use of forced labor as early as 1984.

The auditors deployed forensic investigators, compliance experts, historians and journalists to study tens of thousands of documents from Stasi and IKEA company archives, and interviewed hundreds of IKEA staff and former GDR prisoners.

The investigators also looked into media reports that IKEA had produced furniture in communist Cuba using the forced labor of political prisoners. But they found this affected only a sample of sofas, which did not meet IKEAs quality standards.

The head of the present-day German federal authority charged with curating the Stasis archives and investigating its crimes, Roland Jahn, said it was yet to be seen whether IKEAs probe went far enough.

IKEA has 338 stores in 40 countries. Founder Ingvar Kamprad, an 86-year-old billionaire who lives in Switzerland, still controls the group with his family and is no stranger to controversy, having been involved with a Swedish fascist group in the 1940s.

IKEA got into hot water this year for spying on employees in France and air-brushing women out of catalogues meant for Saudi Arabia..."

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