Job’s Reality Distortion Field Detected in Apple Retail Stores
by moose
This is a great “non-analysis” of the Apple Retail Stores, and how they are probably one of the best consumer retail experience around (well, “around” with quotes since I live in France and we still haven’t one in our country. But I did buy stuff twice from the San Francisco store.) M.B.Darden, in a couple of articles entitled Things I Learned At The Apple Store - Part 1 and “Part 2“, tells about his first ever visit to one of these stores:
I had gone to the mall to pick up my wife’s sneakers. I had no need for a new computer — I thought. It would be crazy to buy this thing [a 2.8GHz 24" iMac he just got demoed by an Apple Genius]. But the Genius, seemingly already abandoning me, was playing with some images and videos on the screen, simultaneously interweaving them, then dragging stuff from one section to another…and it was so…cool, beautiful. It looked so…fun.
When I got home, and I hauled the boxes into the den, my wife simply shook her head. Then she made a few critical comments — of course, she didn’t understand.
It’s worth reading the first piece, because it is a take on why the retail experience offered by the Apple Store makes them the most prosperous stores around (they have amongst the highest revenue per square feet on the planet), and is especially interesting because it is the reaction of someone absolutely outside of the computer domain, with no preconceptions about Macs and PCs (the guy actually has been using DELLs at home for years). It also gives a sharp view of how the “Geniuses” are first and foremost “Sales Geniuses”.
The second piece is funny because the author recounts the virulent reactions his first piece earned, mostly by what he calls “Apple haters”. Also, he went back to the store a couple weeks later to check if his first impressions where still valid. And they were.
