Roughly five years after internet users caught on, the bookshops are suddenly full of books about the user-generated content that “Web 2.0” makes possible: the blogs, Wikipedia, Facebook and the rest. Well, you can forget them, because easily the world’s most profitable enabler of user-generated content opened the doors of its first superstore 50 years ago, in Almhult, Sweden.

It is now hard to imagine life without Ikea. A folk statistic would have you believe that one in 10 Europeans is conceived in an Ikea bed. But isn’t it pushing it a little to compare Ikea to Facebook?