Spending the Night in Ikea is a New Teen Fad, Because Teens are Just The Weirdest

(“Imma hide in this cabinet for six hours!” Photo via ViktorCap/iStockPhoto)

If you’re worried about your teenagers drinking, or doing drugs, or engaging in other dangerous shenanigans, then there’s a bit of good news this year, because the hip new teenage activity is apparently sneaking into Ikea stores after dark and playing on all the furniture.

According to the BBC, this all started with a YouTube video back in August, when two Belgian guys managed to sneak into an Ikea so they could spend the night. They hid in a closet until the store was closed, then they ran around the Ikea and jumped on the beds and entertained themselves with all the Ikea furniture. Their 11-minute video has more than 1.7 million views, and now everybody wants to do it.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFLLIngIKV8]

Ikea is a friendly place, but it seems to be getting pretty tired of this game. They’ve found people hiding in stores in the US, Canada, UK, Belgium, Netherlands, Japan, Australia, and Poland.

It’s getting tougher to successfully overnight at an Ikea, though. Now that everyone is trying this, Ikea has gotten a lot better about finding teenagers hiding in its closets. Two 14-year-old girls were just caught pulling a “non-sponsored sleepover” in Sweden. They’d gotten into the store successfully, but then got caught in the morning.

Another set of 15-year-old girls pulled the same prank, but they were so scared of alarms and cameras that they just stayed in the closets all night, which doesn’t sound like any fun at all, and they were still caught in the morning and got in trouble with the police for trespassing.

Ikea would very much like teenagers to stop doing this. A spokesperson for the company wondered how fun it could possibly be to sneak into a closet in Ikea.

“A long night of sitting still, only to then risk getting into trouble with the law …” he mused. One pictures him shaking his head and thinking, “Teenagers are so weird.”