Yesterday, I Went to the Furniture Store, And...

One of my fondest memories of teaching EFL in Russia is of doing what I call a chain-chant with my class of Tajik ladies (whom a good friend and fellow teacher irreverently called my "Tajiki babes"). A chain-chant works as follows.

You start with a simple sentence in your target language. With my Tajik ladies, I started with:

Yesterday, I went to the furniture store.

Your students say this, first in chorus, than as invididuals.

Then you go around and have each student add something into the sentence. So your first student might say:

Yesterday, I went to the furniture store, and I bought a bed.

The class goes around the room practicing this sentence. Then the third student adds something in, so that you might get:

Yesterday, I went to the furniture store, and I bought a bed and a lamp.

This process repeats itself until you are either out of students, your students make it clear they're tired of the exercise, or everyone is so hoarse they can hardly speak. In the end you can end up with something like:

Yesterday, I went to the furniture store, and I bought a bed and a lamp and a DVD player and a television and a sofa and a chair and a refrigerator and a desk and a table and now I don't have any money!

The idea here to make students recall the relevant vocabulary, to practice using it, and gain the confidence that comes with being able to say even very long sentences in English.

I thought about this exercise today while surfing the IKEA website, especially the part about and now I don't have any money! When I awoke this morning, one of my feet was so sore that I decided it would be best to avoid going any long distances--especially after yesterday, when I ended up walking 15 very long blocks down Christopher Columbus Boulevard because I was mistaken about where the IKEA store actually was.

Now, I've seen some bad websites in my time, but I really have to marvel at IKEA's. About half of what IKEA "sells" on its website, it turns out, is only available in stores. And, it turns out that while IKEA charges only a finger or two to deliver your purchases if you buy them in the store ($70 for up to 500 pounds of merchandise), they demand not just an arm and a leg but all of your appendanges if you try to order anything for home delivery through the website. Sigh!

So I decided to look at some of IKEA's competitors, like Target, Amazon, and Home Decorators. I ended up buying a desk, a bookcase, and a banker's chair from Home Decorator's. There are still a couple of items I want from IKEA, but I can wait a bit until my leg feels better and I'm able to get out the store and beg someone there to help me get the items off the shelf and into a cart.

I also got to learn the hard way just why mattresses become so cheap around Labor Day. The answer, it turns out, is that they can't deliver them to you on time. As I was expecting delivery of a mattress for today (Friday), I called the store to see what the delivery time frame would be. The woman on the phone told me that I had scheduled the mattress . I told her as gently as I could that, no, I had definitely scheduled it for Friday--that as I had come into the store an hour after the cut-off time for next-day delivery, and as the last 10 of the mattress I wanted had just been purchased by what sounded like a group of frat boys, the manager had assured me I could take delivery on Friday. The woman told me she would have to check with her boss and call me back.

When she said this, of course, I expected I would never hear from her again. But amazingly, 15 minutes later, she actually did call me back--with a profuse apology. She said the trucks were already full for Friday's deliveries, but promised me I could have the mattress on Monday--and agreed to knock $50 off my purchase price for the trouble. Wow--it turns out customer service isn't dead. It's just been waiting for a really bad recession to reappear.