Ikea: Stop Playing Hide-and-Seek in Our Stores

There are plenty of hiding places in Ikea stores, but the Swedish furniture chain would prefer not to find tens of thousands of Dutch people in them. The company says it won't allow mass hide-and-seek events in its Netherlands stores, one of which signed up 32,000 people on Facebook, reports Bloomberg. "It's hard to control," a spokeswoman tells Bloomberg. "We need to make sure people are safe in our stores and that's hard to do if we don't even know where they are."

The Netherlands events may have been inspired by a company-sanctioned hide-and-seek game in a Belgian store last summer that attracted around 500 people. "We played hide-and-seek the whole day," the organizer tells Bloomberg. "It was really exhausting, but so much fun." But Alison Griswold at Slate notes that a 32,000-person game of hide-and-seek would exceed the world record around 20 times over, and since the Eindhoven store where it would have taken place is only 308,000 square feet, organizers "might as well play sardines or blob tag instead." (More IKEA stories.)