Sometimes, the little guy does win…

It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, it puts a huge smile on our faces!

Enjoy this story from Reddit: we think you’ll get a kick out of it!

Small Norwegian gets even with IKEA.

“This little story of democratic revenge against an international retail chain took place in Norway recently.

Some years ago a certain Swedish furniture retailer was looking into establishing a couple of new warehouses in Norway.

Now, remember, the entire population of Norway is equivalent to a medium sized international big city, so this is not something IKEA does often.

All in all I think there are about 5 IKEAs in the entire country. Two of them in Oslo.

Anyways, the Swedish number crunchers put some demographic, geographic and economic key numbers in to their model, and came up with a recommendation for a couple alternative sweet spots to locate some new warehouses.

And since they are very much aware that many towns and municipalities would gladly sacrifice virgins and instate a mandatory morning prayer to Ingvar Kamprad in all public schools to secure the benevolence of the yellow and blue furniture church, they said so publicly.

It worked…

Since an IKEA warehouse means lots of local jobs, tax income, and a general boost to the local economy, it had the desired effect:

Municipalities mentioned as possible future IKEA locations started campaigns to make shure THEY would be the chosen spot.

In a small rural municipality a bit south of Oslo the local government did their job well:

They changed the official regulations on a huge swat of land previously strictly regulated for agriculture to accommodate IKEAs needs.

IKEA had bought it and wanted to use it for their new warehouse. Yay! Rejoice!

They reserved course.

A couple of years go by, not much happens, and then IKEA makes a new public announcement:

They have re-analyzed their business forecasts, and have decided not to build a new warehouse this close to Oslo.

Economy is not as booming, tougher times ahead, etc., etc.

BUT, at least they will capitalize on the property they have bought.

Now that it is regulated for general business purpose they can sell what is suddenly a very attractive piece of property and net a very nice profit.

Some background here:

It is generally VERY hard to change the official regulation for agricultural land in Norway.

Although we are a sparsely populated country we don’t have an abundance of good farmland, so fields are protected by law.

You even have to have a license to own farms over a certain size, and you are obliged to live there and use the fields for agricultural production.

So getting a huge field regulated as general housing or business lots means you have struck gold.

If the field is located in an area with a general demand for buildable land the value can increase many tenfold over night.

So, IKEA was expecting to sell business properties for about 200m NOK, that is roughly the equivalent of USD $30m.

For a field they bought for an estimated $100.000…

Not gonna happen!

Until the local municipal council in the span of a little less than a week decided unanimously that it would be vitally important to the preservation of Norway’s agricultural capacity to regulate said field back to agricultural status.

Yup. Would be a shame to let all that fertile soil go to waste, you know.

And no, economic loss due to change of regulatory status is generally NOT compensated in Norway.”

Check out what Reddit users had to say about this.

This reader weighed in.

Another Reddit user was impressed.

Take that, IKEA!

Everyone roots for the little guy.

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.