As you can see by the attached photo, I spent my Saturday afternoon at a local house of commercial worship - IKEA of South Florida. The billboards have popped up along the highways like jarring dandelions in our usual garden of glittery billboards with bizarre sayings such as “IKEA is to South Florida as sunburn is to tourists” (and that one almost makes sense). The media frenzy is building - people can line up starting tomorrow, but … they can’t camp out until the store opens … two days later.

If I hadn’t gotten an early preview shopping pass, though, I considered taking a personal day and swarming in with the rest of them. It’s not just a mob, it’s an adventure. It’s been years since I’ve set foot in an IKEA, and I’ve certainly never been to an opening. I even had my shopping list in mind - a little something to decorate my office, an easel for the kid, and to take loads of pictures.

I got the easel. Pictures … not so much. Even with a plan I was busy experiencing it and ignoring my complaining back and feet for much of three hours. But that was at the end, thinking it all through as I scarfed down a pizza pocket in the cafe beyond the finish like (cash wrap, register line, whatever).

To start our Saturday, we breakfasted with family, then left the children to play as we embarked upon IKEAQUEST. We drove out to Sunrise, where sets of cones and lit signs directed us through several checkpoints to get to the store proper. At each checkpoint, cheery staffers glanced at our pass and waved us in (a few law enforcement officers assisted, waving gatecrashers off of the premises). Once parked in the garage, we headed straight in and checked out the bathrooms (it had been nearly a 300+ mile day already). Almost finished, a few doors missing and no hooks for purses, but it worked.

It was not empty when I entered; two women were chatting about their purchase. It took me a moment to realize they’d already been through and bought something; the way the store is set up it is nearly impossible to end up at that rest room with unpaid merchandise. They were complaining about the price of bags. Yes, the store actually wanted to charge them for a shopping bag! I guess they missed that little detail in the pre-opening media stories, though insane consumerist junkies such as myself came stocked with our own shopping totes.

A nickel for the cheap ones, and fifty-nine cents for the big ones. The big ones are useful - I wish I’d had those as a college student hauling laundry to the mat when I got the notion.

But seriously. We’ve been paying for plastic bags for years. They aren’t free. They’re just built into the cost and not tallied on the bottom of our receipts. Whole Foods almost has it, crediting you 10c for every bag you use - though it could be more since I can pack into two what they’d pack into five - but that’s not quite it either.

This has been percolating a long time, actually, in the back hampster wheel of my mind. All this stuff costs something - and we don’t see it. And as these women admirably demonstrated, we don’t care until we do. And even then, sometimes we don’t. For some folks, the cost and the convenience is worth the disposableness of “things today”, be they diapers, clothes, houses, cars …

And some of us go “nuts” about it one way, or “nuts” about it the other.

But there’s no such thing as a free lunch, infinitely skyrocketing housing and stock market prices, or free plastic bags. Everything you get you pay for. And then some.