Retail Therapy: Furniture Stores Behaving Badly: Five PR (Mega) Nightmares

Wednesday, December 4, 2013, by Lily di Costanzo Illustration by sewluang/Shutterstock

Ikea's main objective is to trick the average homeowner into believing they can successfully construct furniture without an iota of knowledge of the Swedish language, so the amount of trouble it—as well as its fellow furniture chain stores such as Pottery Barn and CB2—manages to rustle up politically is nothing short of jaw-dropping. Even without mentioning a certain batch of horse-laced meatballs—surely a PR nightmare in a category of its own—debacles like racist Halloween costumes, workplace mistreatment, and the unceremonious cropping of female catalog models offer more than enough scandal to keep the Internet properly enraged. Without further ado, above please journey back at some of the most insensitive furniture store blunders from the last three years.

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