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Of course Apple changed the way in-person selling of computers. If you need evidence of this today, find a Best Buy. That was your option before the Apple Store

Of course Apple changed the way in-person selling of computers. If you need evidence of this today, find a Best Buy. That was your option before the Apple Store way of doing it. The last time I was in an Apple store (more than a year ago) I grabbed what I needed and then a kind woman walked up to me and double-checked that was what the item my MacBook needed. She scanned my card right there and I left knowing my Gmail account had a receipt mailed to it. The whole thing took 5 minutes. And the store was crowded at the time too! It was exactly how I would want a retail experience to be. She double checked, then I paid and left. bam. Before the Apple Store, where could you go to get EVEN REMOTELY the same experience? Best Buy? Circuit City? Oh no wait, I know, CompUSA! Sure, buddy. (I know some will try to denounce me as just an Apple fanboy. To that I would point out that for years I exclusively used Linux so I feel fine looking down on both Apple and Microsoft :P That said, it is just that in this instance, Microsoft is clearly playing catch up.)

10098 14y ago
I prefer just ordering gadgets on amazon and have them delivered to my doorstep. Beats having to walk to the store :-)
bitcartel 14y ago
I remember buying my first Commodore Amiga. A small, local store, where they let you play around with the machine and showed you games and demos. Friendly, no hard sell, and cash discount. The guys running the store would give you honest opinions about the software and hardware, they would tell you not to buy something if they figured it wasn't really what you needed. The Apple Store offers a great retail experience, it's streamlined to process sales quickly, and the staff are friendly, but I don't get the feeling they really care about what they're selling.
- nsp 14y ago
  I worked as a specialist(sales) at Apple's highest grossing retail store(5th avenue) while finishing school last winter, and you're basically correct. Apple hires sales people almost entirely on the basis of attitude. The philosophy is essentially that you can teach them the basics(and telling customers you don't know and then going to find out is strongly encouraged) but its harder to teach customer service skills. There's no commission and was never any pressure to move through customers quickly. For 90% of the products apple sells, this strategy works pretty well. The exception is obviously macs, and even there 80% of your interactions require minimal knowledge. So you end up with friendly staff that's not particularly passionate about the tech specs. Which is clearly preferable the unknowledgeable and commission driven model of big box retailers, but a far cry from the small shops of the 90s. Overall it's a hard strategy to argue with. The demographics of computer users has changed dramatically since the heyday of the boutiques, and tailoring your strategy to target the enthusiast demographic tends to alienate the non tech savvy majority.
- georgemcbay 14y ago
  This post hit me like a train full of nostalgia! The "local" store for me was The Memory Location in Wellesley, MA.
beloch 14y ago
Actually, back in the 90's, when PC margins were much higher, there were a plethora of small boutique PC builders out there. Many of them were far nicer than the Apple stores of today. Since they could turn a profit in the kilobucks on a good sale they tended to go to greater lengths to woo customers. Nice decor, not cold-looking ikea cast-offs. Free coffee and snacks. Aeron chairs in front of high-end demo rigs loaded with the latest software, whether it was AutoCAD or Half Life. The salespeople at these places tended to be genuine computer geeks who would enthusiastically gush about anything you asked them rather than bored kids who you can see going through the Apple protocol binder in their heads after every question you ask them. Most systems coming out of places like this were custom, right down to the installed applications. Of course, PC margins gradually shrank until they basically became commodity items. Assembling PC's gradually got easier too. e.g. When was the last time you had to set IRQ/DMA channels via dip switches or had to worry about which side of that ribbon cable goes to pin 0? Assembling a PC today is practically impossible to mess up, so a lot more people do it themselves. As nice as many of these boutiques were and despite the care that many of them put into their work, their business model simply became unsustainable. Note that Apple's computers were also sold in some boutique stores at one point, although in the 90's stores specializing in Apple products were already not doing well because Apple of the 90's was decidedly unsexy. (The stores of the 90's specializing in Apple products that I can remember were all decidedly dingy actually...) Please do not say that Apple "changed the way" computers are sold in person. They didn't. They leveraged their higher profit-margins to build stores similar to those that their own hardware had been sold in barely a decade earlier. This let them cut out retailers, increase vertical integration, and maximize profits. There is nothing new about Apple stores except scale and profitability in an era of commodity pricing. Don't get me wrong, that's admirable, but from a business stand-point, not from a user-experience stand-point.
- corporalagumbo 14y ago
  Apples and oranges. The computer store as rarefied design-temple cum chic-hangout-spot is all-Apple and a real innovation. An innovation that only became possible this decade, after Apple made computers mainstream and fashionable, with a little help from iPods and iPhones. There's a shift in the interface of computing technology and wider culture underway and it is embodied in a lot of what Apple is doing, and the Store is an important element in that shift.. Another important point of difference was that Apple built its retail experience on such an ambitious scale. But the real innovation was to see it before anyone else and execute so consummately, and execute without any prompting. Apple crossed all the ts and dotted the is -without- any real competition to one up - just because they thought it was the right thing to do. That's why Microsoft looks so weak with their stores. Because they're only doing it to try and look cool, after someone else did it. Whereas Apple simply is cool. Real cool is effortless. This isn't some checklist comparison, this is about the essence of how a corporation thinks and acts.

10098 14y ago

I prefer just ordering gadgets on amazon and have them delivered to my doorstep. Beats having to walk to the store :-)

bitcartel 14y ago

I remember buying my first Commodore Amiga. A small, local store, where they let you play around with the machine and showed you games and demos. Friendly, no hard sell, and cash discount. The guys running the store would give you honest opinions about the software and hardware, they would tell you not to buy something if they figured it wasn't really what you needed. The Apple Store offers a great retail experience, it's streamlined to process sales quickly, and the staff are friendly, but I don't get the feeling they really care about what they're selling.

nsp 14y ago
I worked as a specialist(sales) at Apple's highest grossing retail store(5th avenue) while finishing school last winter, and you're basically correct. Apple hires sales people almost entirely on the basis of attitude. The philosophy is essentially that you can teach them the basics(and telling customers you don't know and then going to find out is strongly encouraged) but its harder to teach customer service skills. There's no commission and was never any pressure to move through customers quickly. For 90% of the products apple sells, this strategy works pretty well. The exception is obviously macs, and even there 80% of your interactions require minimal knowledge. So you end up with friendly staff that's not particularly passionate about the tech specs. Which is clearly preferable the unknowledgeable and commission driven model of big box retailers, but a far cry from the small shops of the 90s. Overall it's a hard strategy to argue with. The demographics of computer users has changed dramatically since the heyday of the boutiques, and tailoring your strategy to target the enthusiast demographic tends to alienate the non tech savvy majority.
georgemcbay 14y ago
This post hit me like a train full of nostalgia! The "local" store for me was The Memory Location in Wellesley, MA.

beloch 14y ago

Actually, back in the 90's, when PC margins were much higher, there were a plethora of small boutique PC builders out there. Many of them were far nicer than the Apple stores of today. Since they could turn a profit in the kilobucks on a good sale they tended to go to greater lengths to woo customers. Nice decor, not cold-looking ikea cast-offs. Free coffee and snacks. Aeron chairs in front of high-end demo rigs loaded with the latest software, whether it was AutoCAD or Half Life. The salespeople at these places tended to be genuine computer geeks who would enthusiastically gush about anything you asked them rather than bored kids who you can see going through the Apple protocol binder in their heads after every question you ask them. Most systems coming out of places like this were custom, right down to the installed applications. Of course, PC margins gradually shrank until they basically became commodity items. Assembling PC's gradually got easier too. e.g. When was the last time you had to set IRQ/DMA channels via dip switches or had to worry about which side of that ribbon cable goes to pin 0? Assembling a PC today is practically impossible to mess up, so a lot more people do it themselves. As nice as many of these boutiques were and despite the care that many of them put into their work, their business model simply became unsustainable. Note that Apple's computers were also sold in some boutique stores at one point, although in the 90's stores specializing in Apple products were already not doing well because Apple of the 90's was decidedly unsexy. (The stores of the 90's specializing in Apple products that I can remember were all decidedly dingy actually...) Please do not say that Apple "changed the way" computers are sold in person. They didn't. They leveraged their higher profit-margins to build stores similar to those that their own hardware had been sold in barely a decade earlier. This let them cut out retailers, increase vertical integration, and maximize profits. There is nothing new about Apple stores except scale and profitability in an era of commodity pricing. Don't get me wrong, that's admirable, but from a business stand-point, not from a user-experience stand-point.

corporalagumbo 14y ago
Apples and oranges. The computer store as rarefied design-temple cum chic-hangout-spot is all-Apple and a real innovation. An innovation that only became possible this decade, after Apple made computers mainstream and fashionable, with a little help from iPods and iPhones. There's a shift in the interface of computing technology and wider culture underway and it is embodied in a lot of what Apple is doing, and the Store is an important element in that shift.. Another important point of difference was that Apple built its retail experience on such an ambitious scale. But the real innovation was to see it before anyone else and execute so consummately, and execute without any prompting. Apple crossed all the ts and dotted the is -without- any real competition to one up - just because they thought it was the right thing to do. That's why Microsoft looks so weak with their stores. Because they're only doing it to try and look cool, after someone else did it. Whereas Apple simply is cool. Real cool is effortless. This isn't some checklist comparison, this is about the essence of how a corporation thinks and acts.