We’ve often heard that we don’t know what we’ve got until it’s gone, but it’s also true that we don’t know how much something means to people until someone threatens to take it away.
I have to admit that I’ve found myself mourning menu items that restaurant chains no longer serve, but it’s still easy to underestimate just how many people are impacted when a company decides they’re going retire one of their products.
RELATED STORIES
And while recent news has made it clear that IKEA’s large shark plush toys known as Blahaj enjoy a lot of popularity the world over, it’s particularly fascinating to learn how much this varies from region to region.
Because based on the spike of activity throughout China’s social media networks, people there are taking the news particularly hard.
For those who are unaware, a Blahaj is a three-foot long shark plush that gained widespread popularity in 2019 after a social media trend depicted them doing “human things.”
But depending on where you are, there’s a good chance that you’ve noticed these toys are pretty hard to come by lately.
According to Insider , the Blahaj is not listed on China’s IKEA website and it’s now out of stock in Hong Kong, Singapore, or Taiwan.
And when a fan in the UK pressed their local IKEA’s twitter account about a similar situation on September 26, they heard that there weren’t any available there due to supply issues.
But while that’s increasingly common nowadays, the real panic came when that tweet revealed that IKEA U.K. was going to stop selling the plushes entirely by April of 2022.
Although they were still available in Japan, Malaysia and South Korea at last report, this news apparently led to a particularly massive uproar in China.
As Insider reported, a thread announcing the news on the Chinese social media platform Weibo quickly amassed 72 million views and spawned over 10,000 spin-off discussion threads.
In them, users either celebrated getting a Blahaj shark before supplies ran out or lamented the news with messages like, “I can’t believe there’s a chance I’m never going to be able to get it again” and, “Please don’t take the Blahaj shark away from me.”
However, it seems that IKEA’s decision to discontinue the plushes isn’t as universal as it may have appeared at first.
When a worried fan asked the IKEA account representing the United States whether this was true stateside, they soon received word that the chain’s American operations have no plans to stop producing and selling the sharks.
The same is apparently true in Canada .
Within three days of the U.K. announcement, a Twitter user named Madison King reached out to IKEA operations worldwide to determine where the Blahaj toys would still be sold and where they would be discontinued.
Although IKEA branches throughout eastern Europe and Asia apparently didn’t respond to these inquiries, we can see that the continued sale of the shark toys was confirmed in Russia, Sweden, Italy, Austria, and Australia alongside the North American countries we were already aware of.
It also appears that the IKEA chapters discontinuing the products could be more localized than we thought. Although most of western Europe is apparently doing away with them, there don’t appear to be any confirmed efforts to discontinue them outside of that region.
But until more of those purple sections turn blue or red, it’ll be hard to tell whether the Chinese fans I mentioned actually need to worry so much.
h/t: Insider
