IKEA has banned Dutch users from playing hide-and-seek in its stores. It follows 32,000 Facebook users saying they planned to hide in one store alone.

It appears the crackdown follows a perfect example of the philosophy that if you give people an inch, they’ll take a mile. Last July, a 29-year old woman in Belgium wrote a list of 30 things to do before her 30th birthday. This included a hide-and-seek game in a local IKEA store, which she noted was effectively “an extremely large living room.”

The store agreed to host the game, which attracted around 500 players. Not surprisingly, word spread online about how much fun everyone had, and others soon decided to organize similar events — without the cooperation of the store managers.

The craze spread over the border to the Netherlands and turned into a flash mob situation. Blooomberg reports that 32,000 people signed up to a planned Facebook event for hide-and-seek in an Eindhoven store, with events in Amsterdam and Utrecht attracting 19,000 and 12,000 people respectively.

While there’s no telling how many of those would actually have turned up, IKEA isn’t taking any chances and has made it clear that such events are forbidden. A spokeswoman told Bloomberg that “We need to make sure people are safe in our stores and that’s hard to do if we don’t even know where they are.” She added that “this hide and seek phenomenon has reached proportions where we can no longer guarantee the security of those who are playing or our customers and employees.”

[Image credit: IKEA]