IKEA Staff In Video Game Earn More than Those In Real Stores

Virtual meatballs are being served hot, while the Earth's materials are depleted in exchange for rendering polygons.

The multiplayer game Roblox was released in 2006, quickly gathering mass popularity. For many younger people, it was the digital equivalent of LEGO, allowing simple but expansive building in a sandbox setting. Most of the fun in Roblox comes from interacting with other players. Some of IKEA's founder Ingvar Kamprad's quotes about his childhood embody the spirit of Roblox, “Together, we built four palaces and told tales. Grandfather knew the art of play and accepted my fantasy; nothing was impossible; I really only feel good when I’m with other people.”

More and more companies have realized that an active presence in virtual platforms gives them a unique marketing and revenue opportunity. By the end of June 2024, IKEA will have opened its virtual store in Roblox, with actual people employed to walk around and help guest-players. The going rate for this is ~ £13.15 per hour, meaning they earn more than the majority of IKEA staff based in the real store.

The initial success or failure of the store will be fun to cover, so look out for that in the coming weeks. On the job description, it mentions in-game staff “serving up endless amounts of meatballs.” This offers an easy way to spam or troll the store. Unruly players will coat the store in meatballs. Or there may be rooms so loaded up with meatballs they resemble the maw of a sea lamprey.

There is something horrifying about this new time we are in. Why are staff in the virtual IKEA stores paid more than the real one? The simulated object is valued more than the physical one. In a previous letter, I explored this idea that we prefer representation to reality in the electric age.

The Simulacra Civilization

That’s why games like Roblox, which have a creative and simplified perspective of space, are a draw for advertising. Players have already indirectly created digital assets for IKEA, including maps, furniture and even employee outfits exist already — memes spreading into all manner of mini-games or maps. Many of these take place in a nightmarish version of the store. Of the users who made or supported these maps, parodying IKEA, many of them may actually helped boost the popularity of the IKEA stores. By joining Roblox, IKEA has become its own opposite, its own negation.

Historically, IKEA has sent cease-and-desist letters to independent video game developers who have made horror games in the likeness of IKEA stores. This time IKEA is actively advertising in Roblox, so they may take an entirely different strategy.

All this began with a family in the countryside of southern Sweden. In the 1950s, Kamprad started IKEA as a mail-order business selling small items like pens and wallets. IKEA is an acronym combining Kamprad’s initials with the first letters of his farm (Elmtaryd) and village (Agunnaryd).

Later, it introduced the delivery of flat-pack furniture, made out of trees from the forest. This turned out to be cheap, simple and huge. Moving out of the mail-order business into a physical space turned out to be a pivotal decision by Kamprad. It was necessary to build trust and branding, as IKEA was a start up company in the truest sense. Yet the IKEA catalogue was published even before the first store opened. The catalog became the most widely distributed publications in the world, with more copies printed annually than the Bible, until its discontinuation in 2020​. Perhaps then it’s time for IKEA to step into the digital space too, appealing to the newer generations.

IKEA launched its virtual store on Roblox as part of the "Careers Done Different" campaign to target younger audiences. Furthermore, Roblox has over 70 million daily users with players spending an average of 3 hours per session. Yet IKEA is not unique in its pursuit of a virtual marketplace in Roblox. Launched in 2021, Nikeland on Roblox is a virtual world where users can engage in various sports activities and events. The platform includes digital showrooms and interactive spaces modelled after real Nike stores. A particularly interesting phenomenon occurred when Nike integrated real-world events into Nikeland, such as the NBA All-Star Week, which attracted massive virtual crowds and virality.

In 2021, Gucci celebrated its 100th anniversary by creating a virtual art installation and boutique on Roblox, called Gucci Garden. Users could explore different themed rooms that represented various collections from the brand’s history. This virtual store gained widespread attention when limited-edition virtual items, like the Gucci Dionysus bag, sold for higher prices than their real-life counterparts, highlighting the growing value of digital assets.

In 2022, Walmart launched its Universe of Play on Roblox, a virtual space designed to engage children and families with interactive games and experiences. The store included features like scavenger hunts, virtual merchandise, and interactive play areas. This move was part of Walmart's strategy to blend physical and digital shopping experiences, showcasing the future of retail engagement.

Virtual reality headsets blur the line between simulated and real even further. While corporations like Accenture and Walmart use VR for communication and collaboration among remote teams, and have tested it for employee training, this is more of a productivity tool, soon enough becoming a way to cut costs from physical interactions. VRChat, another popular multiplayer game with a dedicated userbase, conducts interviews and has its staff perform within its virtual space too. Having staff who understand and think in terms of this space is central to the ethos of the company. IKEA’s Roblox service would stand to benefit from having users in VR headsets to create a more immersive experience for its store.

It seems to me we are decimating the Earth while cyberspace becomes more and more central to our existence. There is something deeply backwards about materials from the Earth being used up to produce the virtual rendering of IKEA’s meatballs. To support massive production, we churn through 15 billion trees a year. IKEA uses about 1% of the world’s supply to pay for fake furniture, advertised through polygonal furniture.

Trees are necessary for carbon sequestration—they are the lungs of our Planet, releasing oxygen into the air. They provide habitats and ecological support to countless lifeforms. Soil is preserved and water is retained because of trees' roots. By using up a tree, heat leaks out, wasted. Sawmills throw off sawdust, paper mills discard black liquor, furniture factories have offcuts and scraps. The wood gets used to facilitate development, leading to larger demands of wood in turn.

There is a trade-off between the presence of virtual trees and real trees. With virtual ones, we need data centers, wiring, carbon emissions, all opposite to the value that trees themselves provide. See how much we waste and how little we care for nature? Why are we so quick to bet on the metaverse for our next lives? As Saruman fueled the flames of his own demise by destroying the forest, so too do we continue to deplete our natural environment for artifice. Our social nature has been infected by the psychic parasites of companies. Blissfully we pay, with attention and money, for electricity to flow into rows of servers, whirring away, crunching numbers back and forth. More entropy bred from the movement of electricity.

When all of our materials, food and wealth has been eviscerated and converted into currency in cyberspace, we will learn a lesson our bones will remember. As abandoned buildings fall into ruin and the towns become overgrown, the physical world will become a relic of the past. All, but a few perhaps, swimming around cyberspace, spending the currency that we had to burn up our world to obtain. What happens then, when the data farms and power grids collapse? Instead of merely being trapped in another dimension, we will likely just pop out of existence, in one moment. The only survivors will inherit what’s left of the Earth, now an excavation site crawling with parasites and infestations left untended to.

Read on to learn more about legacy businesses uses digital platforms to sell old goods, the new age of celebrity influencers, and how modern media has extended our senses into the metaverse.