The real reason IKEA is so confusing to navigate

If you've ever spent a Kafkaesque Sunday ambling aimlessly through the labyrinthine interior of an IKEA with frantic thoughts of escape flitting through you mind, we may finally have an explanation for your ordeal.

What seemed like a meaningless exercise in gratuitous brutality was actually a clever sales ploy. That's right, they make it impossible to escape on purpose.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Alan Penn, a professor of architectural computing at University College London, recently gave a lecture on why IKEA makes their stores so difficult to navigate.

According to Prof. Penn, getting lost in the store leaves shoppers feeling "licensed to impulse purchase." And the strategy works. Approximately 60 per cent of purchases at IKEA weren't on shoppers' lists.

via ca.news.yahoo.com