IKEA Offers Discount To Pregnant Women If They ‘Pee On Their Magazine Ad’

If you live in the U.S. or Europe, you’ve probably been to IKEA. About the biggest of big-box stores, it’s the Swedish furniture and housewares retailers that operates giant warehouses full of attractive, suspiciously inexpensive furniture in the simple, Scandinavian design tradition. You probably bought your nightstand there, or maybe a bed frame. If you did, you probably had a stressed-out, tear-soaked fight with your spouse there. That just happens at IKEA. They also sell a ton of baby furniture, which, technically, anybody can buy. You don’t have to have a baby, or a baby on the way, to buy baby furniture at IKEA, but you can. However, if you’re a woman who is pregnant with a child, IKEA just put out an offer that’s difficult to refuse.

Currently running in major Swedish women’s interest magazine Amelia, is an IKEA print ad with an interesting bonus feature. An advertisement for cribs devised by Swedish ad agency Åkestam Holst and Mercene Labs, part of the page is treated with a special chemical that turns the ad into a pregnancy test. If the test comes out “positive” (Congrats!), it reveals a coupon that can be exchanged at an IKEA store for a discount off of a crib. The winners: expectant parents. The losers: IKEA cashiers that have to handle urine-drenched coupons.

Is this weird? A triumph of science? Disgusting? The people of Twitter had some thoughts…