No More Hide-and-Seek! Ikea Shuts Down Massive Games at Dutch Stores

Tens of thousands of people had signed up to play each enormous game of hide-and-seek in Ikea's sprawling, labyrinthine stores — a new phenomenon in the Netherlands.

Ikea has a message for people wanting to converge on its sprawling, labyrinthine stores for giant games of hide and seek: Go play someplace else.

The phenomenon has taken off in the Netherlands where a whopping 19,000 people signed up to a Facebook group promoting a game at Ikea's Amsterdam branch next month. Another 13,000 signed up online for a game in the Ikea store in the city of Utrecht.

But the Swedish retail giant has bad news for folks wanting to hide among its room-like furniture displays: The numbers signing up are getting out of hand and the events have been blocked.

"We have contacted these pages on social media and humbly asked them to have their hide and seek games somewhere else," Ikea spokeswoman Martina Smedberg in Sweden said Tuesday.

Copyright AP - Associated Press
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