UCL on the IKEA crush

An interesting article by Philip Ball, author of Critical Mass: how one thing leads to another, on crowd control at the IKEA opening has been published on UCL's website (after publication in the Guardian).

The article contains some detail on why crushes happen, but my favorite paragraph is one that criticses the whole IKEA experience:

There is something uniquely unpleasant about the Ikea experience in London ... 'Everybody I know hates it,' says Alan Penn, an urban modeller at UCL, 'but everybody goes. I think it's a form of sado-masochism.' Once you've weathered the horrors of getting there, you enter into sensory deprivation in an environment that is manipulative and particularly prone to difficult crowd dynamics.