• Los Angeles Times, Tuesday, August 25, 2009 10:42 AM

Thousands of "looky-loos" come to IKEA Beijing -- or Yi Jia, as the store is called -- every weekend just to partake in such Western cultural rituals as enjoying the air conditioning, posing for snapshots and getting free soda refills, David Pierson reports. Some just nap on the comfy furniture.

The store has been open for a decade, and its success "can be traced, in part, to how grounded it is in the capital's zeitgeist," Pierson writes. It's a bastion of cheap modern furniture at a time when more and more Chinese are becoming part of the middle class.

IKEA executives, hoping browsers will eventually become buyers, don't shoo anybody away or even rouse the nappers. "The brand awareness is great, but the question is, how do we get people to open up their wallets and spend money?" says Linda Xu, a company spokeswoman who rolls her eyes when she encounters three slumbering customers.

The new consumerism certainly has a way to go in China. One university student took photographs of a bunch of IKEA products and posted them on his blog with the caption: "I don't need to buy them because I have pictures."

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