As a Swede currently living in California who also has visited IKEA in several different countries I can report that the general experience of visiting IKEA is pretty much as stressful and disorienting here as in Sweden. There are some local variations in the product portfolio both due to different standards like in bed sizes and kitchen and cultural differences. You cannot find a cheese slicer in my nearest IKEA and they have icing on their cinnamon buns (almost blasphemy).
To be honest, IKEA is a Swedish company by brand only. The products are sourced from wherever it is cheapest to manufacture right now and the ownership structure is so complex, multinational and tax-avoidance schemy that probably only the head honcho Ingvar Kamprad (IK in IKEA) who until recently resided in Switzerland, knows where the profit ends up.
(edit: got Ingvar Kamprads name wrong first time around)
Just some anecdote on Kamprad: Switzerland was also the first country for IKEA to expand into and we now have some of the largest stores. I suspect it had to do with Kamprad's early interest in the country, and possibly because it was a good test market for them. Most Swiss have heard some of stories about him - e.g. him driving an old Volvo, using and washing up plastic dishes and also that he often visited the first Ikea in Switzerland (Spreitenbach) in order to see how things go and optimise the strategy.
For me it has always been impressive how streamlined an Ikea is towards maximising revenue. I'm one of these people who tends to analyse my surroundings constantly for possible optimizations - yet in Ikea I couldn't come up with even one improvement that would make it better for the company. This alone is actually rather refreshing for me, finally a place where I can switch off my brain and just indulge in a bit of consumption!
And here I was thinking this was a Brazillian invention (they are wildly popular in Brazil, everywhere you go in Brazil, even the middle of nowhere, like Amazon Rainforest, you will find someone that owns one).
the most popular cheese, far ahead of anything else, is mozarella... it is not high quality as actual italian ones though (it is way less "fibrous").
then we have Prato (it means "Plate" as in dinner plate... or dinner dish...), that has the exact same recipe as Danbo, but is made with brazillian milk, and seemly tastes very differently (I dunno, since I never ate Danbo).
then we have a purely local invention called Minas, named after the state of Minas Gerais, despite being a São Paulo invention... (go figure...), that one is hard to describe, since it refers to 4 different cheeses (or the same cheese with 4 slightly variations in the process to make them, but with end results drastically different).
Then other italian cheeses are popular here, maybe because the large italian community here, and how much Brazillians also love pizza, so here almost every supermarket offers Provolone, Parmesan and Gorgonzola.
In urban areas you can find frequently "Steppe" cheese, it is a russian cheese it seems, it is expensive (double the price of "Prato") but not much as local clones of french/swiss cheese (Steppe is half of the price of local clones of Emmental, Gruyere, etc...)
cheddar cheese is sold a bit, but most people consider it low quality crap, the biggest seller of cheddar cheese don't even bother in selling actual cheddar, and instead sell a clone that tastes mostly the same, for very little... people still prefer to buy more expensive mozarella instead.
There's cheese which is made in America which for most intents and purposes is cheese like everywhere else, and then there's "American cheese" which comes in slices or blocks and is "cheese product" and only vaguely resembles the real thing despite being delicious in certain guilty-pleasure situations.
In my experience, the more popular american cheeses are quite mild and have a low melting temperature to get a good melt and stretch on warm food. I don't find them particularly interesting to just slice and put on a piece of bread. It is often easy enough to find good but expensive imported cheeses.
In Switzerland we do cheese shavings like described in the following article (although only for a specific type of cheese, the 'tete de moine' (monk's head). http://itotd.com/articles/217/the-girolle/
Huh. I've had a cheese slicer at home forever (Scottish-American).
It mostly gets used at dinner parties, when we buy nicer cheeses; inexpensive cheese is almost all pre-sliced in the US. Same holds true for my parents.
Their main design office is in Sweden and most designers are Swedish. Sometimes they collaborate with 'star' designers and they have been accused of plagiarism quite a few times.
IKEA is owned by former Nazi and famous tax evader Ingvar Kamprad. IKEA is actually a Dutch non-profit(!) foundation. It's part of a very intricate scheme to minimize the tax burden of the owners. IMHO, Kamprad has been exploiting Sweden's good will abroad (and maybe reputation for quality?) but he doesn't give a whole lot back. They do sell good and cheap furniture though. :)
He wasn't exactly the only teenager that were swept away by the rather popular national socialistic party at the time before the war. Germany was an important cultural influence and they sort of bootstrapped the economy, etc. There are publicly available lists for anyone that is interested. The researcher Tobias Hübinette seems to be focusing on issues related to Sweden, "whiteness" and race. http://www.tobiashubinette.se/
Regarding the trusts... I think that at the time (1970) and heavily socialist influenced era, it was more or less the only option to secure a privately owned and growing company from the tax man. The taxes were absurd at the time and small privately owned companies were very vulnerably to death-by-tax, especially if the owner died unexpectedly.
When the trusts are set up and the ownership is moved, there is not that much you can do about that actually, and the trusts can control to some degree how much tax the corporations pay as the trusts can charge royalties and set rates to minimize the earnings in the corporations that are "IKEA". Kamprad is probably a board member of all the important trusts, but the trusts are limited by their charter though, so there are limits to the control. It's true that they can't just give money away, at least without a courts ruling.
But still. IKEA have done a lot for the Swedish economy, there is still plenty of production in Sweden (as in Poland, or any cheap place in the world), and a lot of designers and engineers are employed in Sweden.
From this Swede's point of view, IKEA is primarily a global distributor of fresh Lingonberry jam. (I hear they also sell furniture.)
(Seriously, I don't get why lingonberries don't get a wider, eh, distribution. It's brilliant in so many things. My favorite is just tossing lingonberry jam into cream-based sauces.)
Swedes, as citiens of a kinda small and inherently insignificant county kinda fetishise any foreign recognition. I think that's why we like IKEA and H&M.
There's an old but good show that discusses the subject of our self-image pretty accurately (dunno if there are any english subtitles available) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4-V8_r0y-o
And Max Martin, the Swedish songwriter behind most of the international superstars of the last decade or two. Liked a song by Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Kelly Clarkson, Pink or Britney Spears? Good chance it was actually a Max Martin song: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin
After moving to Hawaii, I've discovered that IKEA products are largely not appropriate for tropical climates -- all the fiberboard stuff has gotten severe mold infestations.
In CA, I loved going to IKEA to stock up on some swedish foods they have. I was very sad when they stopped carrying the foam cars, now it's mostly IKEA-branded stuff...
To be honest, IKEA is a Swedish company by brand only. The products are sourced from wherever it is cheapest to manufacture right now and the ownership structure is so complex, multinational and tax-avoidance schemy that probably only the head honcho Ingvar Kamprad (IK in IKEA) who until recently resided in Switzerland, knows where the profit ends up.
(edit: got Ingvar Kamprads name wrong first time around)