What would Thanksgiving be without a nice couch to go flop on after a day of gluttony…

Consider the couch — or chair or coffee table — for a second and there’s a good chance it came from the yellow and blue juggernaut of the furniture world known as Ikea.

But for all of its streamlined Northern European goodness, it turns out there are plenty of economic mysteries that go on behind the scenes at Ikea.

Oliver Roeder is a senior writer for FiveThirtyEight and spoke with Molly Wood about his piece, titled “The Weird Economics of Ikea.”