When I went to Ikea on Wednesday, I found a blue armchair that I wanted to buy. So last night I went back to Ikea to get it, and they had sold out.

It’s actually four separate pieces: a birch armchair, a blue armchair cover, a birch footstool, and a blue footstool cover. They had sold out of the blue armchair cover, so as far as they were concerned, they didn’t have what I needed.

I had them look it up in the computer to see when they’d be getting more, and they informed me that they wouldn’t be getting any in the next three shipments (over the next three weeks), so I would have to “check back” in three weeks to find out if it would be included in the following three shipments.

In my experience with Ikea, that means the product is being discontinued and will never return. That’s happened to my mother and I several times. If they tell us to check back in three weeks (because the computer just says that they’re not getting any; it never says why), the product never returns.

On my way out, though, it occurred to me that the employee didn’t check to see if there were any of these armchairs at other Ikea locations, such as Carson and Industry. Sure enough, there were one hundred forty-three of them in Carson and forty of them in Industry.

So I left Ikea Tustin and drove to Ikea Industry. Normally I would have gone to Carson, but I knew there would be more traffic that way because of the time of day, so I chose Industry.

Sure enough, there were forty of them at the Industry store, so I bought the birch armchair, the blue armchair cover, the birch footrest, and the blue footrest cover, and I put them in my car.

Now, the chair cover and armrest cover were wrapped in plastic, and it was sunny, so I could barely make out that they were blue. However, I wanted to make sure that they wouldn’t clash with the blue on my sofa at home, so I closely compared the chair cover with a sofa pillow (which I had put in my car for this purpose). The chair cover was lighter, but it was the same family of blue, so it wasn’t a problem. Pleased with my purchase, I drove home.

When I arrived home, I removed the chair cover and footstool cover from their plastic wrapping only to find that they clashed with each other. They were both labeled “medium blue” on the outside, but on the inside the footstool cover was closer to what I’d call “purple.”

I don’t want to drive all the way to Industry again. So tomorrow I’m going to visit Ikea Tustin and see if maybe, just maybe, they have some of the blue footstool covers in stock even though I know they don’t have any of the blue armchair covers in stock. If they don’t, I’m just going to return the whole thing and look somewhere else. Stupid Ikea.