Seventeen percent of New Yorkers have worked while on the toilet. Thirteen percent of Mumbaikars have morning sex. And women in Moscow wear almost as much perfume as Parisian mademoiselles. This is all according to IKEA, which has been collecting information about the residents of eight major cities across the globe.
IKEA's “Life At Home” study, released Tuesday, looks at the morning habits of more than 1,000 residents of Berlin, London, Moscow, Mumbai, New York, Shanghai and Stockholm, and includes tidbits about how often residents of each city hit the snooze button, take a shower in the morning, put on makeup, have morning sex and work on the toilet. It's a very important study, basically.
The Scandinavian furniture manufacturer and purveyor of terrifying, maze-like stores has conducted similar research in the past, but this recent survey is more ambitious -- and weirder -- in its scope. Earlier reports have asked mundane questions like which room of a home gets the most use.
Some of the results were not all that shocking. For example, residents of the eight cities use technology for an average of 11 minutes every morning, and New Yorkers spend more time grooming than any other city. But some were surprising, like that Mumbaikars simultaneously have more sex in the morning than any other city (13 percent reported getting some regularly) and are most likely to pray then as well (53 percent).
And by the way, New Yorkers work on the toilet more often than any other city.
The digital version of the report includes an interactive “Data Mixing Board” that lets you compare cities by different variables.
For instance, here’s how many people in each city have sex in the morning, ranked according to how stressed they feel when they wake up:
“Ikea’s vision is to create a better everyday life, and everyday life starts with the morning,” IKEA Group research manager Mikael Ydholm told The Huffington Post. With the survey, “we wanted to share the knowledge we have and also spark debate,” he said.
The researchers were surprised by “the gap between our beliefs and what we actually do in the morning,” Ydholm said. For instance, a large percentage of those polled said it’s important to speak with your children in the morning, but only 23 percent actually did it. Meanwhile, only 20 percent of respondents said it was important to check social media in the morning, but 48 percent said they did it anyway.
When asked why sex and toilet time figured into the survey, Ydholm was matter-of-fact. “We wanted to cover every kind of activity that people do in the morning,” he said. “It was not that we decided to go for anything specific or intimate.”
He added that IKEA plans to conduct similar studies in the future.
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