It’s all very well and good if you want to play a game of grown-up hide-and-seek. However, IKEA would rather you didn’t play it inside their stores. The global megastore chain stopped planned games in their stores in the Netherlands. More than 32,000 people had signed up on Facebook for the biggest game at the store in Eindhoven, and now the organizers are looking for a different spot to hold the game.

There were 19,000 people signed up to potentially take part in a game in Amsterdam, and 12,000 signed up for a game at the store in Utrecht. The stores canceled the fun event for safety reasons: even if only a few hundred people actually showed up, that would be some serious scampering around.

“We need to make sure people are safe in our stores,” an IKEA spokeswoman told Bloomberg News, “and that’s hard to do if we don’t even know where they are.” The game in Belgium that inspired this one included participants hiding under beds and in refrigerators.

“Ikea is like an extremely large living room,” said the organizer of the original event in Belgium that inspired the imitators in the Netherlands.

Ikea Stamps Out Hide-and-Seek Games in Dutch Furniture Stores [Bloomberg Business]

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