When is a store not a store?
When it’s an Apple Store.
Since their mythic inception, forged in the crucible of Ron Johnson and Steve Jobs and their hippie-dippy retail ideas, the Apple Store has always been an anti-store. It’s not your daddy’s CompUSA! It’s not your grandma’s RadioShack! The Apple Store was a place to chill with your friends, while you looked at all the weird stuff no one was buying until iPods were popular, and then the iPhone.
A number of architectural revisions have occurred since then, and technical reorganizations have reshaped the shop. But the stubborn persistence to be unlike other retailers, often to the point of frustration, remains the same.
By my count, there are three ways to behave at the Apple Store as a customer seeking to buy something:
- You approach an Apple Store employee and tell them you want to purchase something.
- You approach an Apple Store employee and tell them you want to pick up something you ordered already.
- You use your iPhone’s Apple Store app to feel like a thief taking small accessories that are on the shelves.
That’s not getting into the frustration of Genius appointments—this is just simple commerce. Yet two of those options involve tackling a retail employee to the ground in a busy store to have them then do some stuff on their point-of-sale device, and promise something will emerge from a mysterious back room at some future point in time.
You can also enter an impromptu line that always seems to form at the front of an Apple Store, where 1-2 Apple Store employees stand with iPads acting as maître d’s. They are not the employees who will process your transactions, they are the employees that hand you off to other employees who rely on those mysterious backroom employees to bring the items in question.
The Apple Store app can also be used for purchases, but unless an item is there, you still need to ask someone to get the item. It can make the act of purchasing a phone case go a faster, but nothing helps retrieve items from the dreaded backroom.
Is this an improvement on the classic idea of how a store should work? Tasks have been diffused in a pool of staff that isn’t providing a more helpful or personal touch beyond charming anecdotes or congratulating you on the thing you bought.
(That’s not to disparage Apple Store employees. This is a problem way above their pay grade.)
Personal touch
If there’s an improvement to be found here, I guess it’s that customers don’t have to wait in line at the register—but that’s only because the line has moved and is invisible. How long will it take to get an Apple Watch? Who could say? Just go wait over by the Apple Watch table because someone must assist you personally.
Even when they show up they just stand there, because there’s nothing for them to do. You’re still waiting for some unseen force to bring you something so you can leave. You can share the awkward waiting together. Shared experiences can lead to bonding, I suppose. Is this progress?
In any event, it seems like the wrong way to deploy an Apple Store worker. If we’re all out in the front waiting for the product from the backroom, maybe there should be more people in the backroom? My Apple Store already smells like a men’s locker room full of onions—I don’t need more people out in the front standing around and waiting aimlessly without even a line to focus on.
Let me flee into the shadows
One of the worst parts of the shopping experience is when you buy a product that Apple feels obligated to help you set up in the store. When I purchased my Series 3 Apple Watch, I had to wait for one particular employee to become available because he could help me set up my Watch. I did not want to do that even before there was a worldwide viral outbreak, and I sure don’t want to do it now. I want to take my item, like a starved rat clutching a morsel of bread, and flee back into the shadows from whence I came.
When I bought my Series 7 Apple Watch online, and showed up to get it, there were three bored employees ready to clock out at the end of their day standing with me at the table, asking if I was sure I didn’t need help, despite my protestations. They went on to try to upsell me on AppleCare and some alternative bands.
I’m sure that some people aren’t like me, and want that help. But when I say that I don’t want anything but the item, I want to be listened to. If I could communicate to the iPad bouncers out front that I just want to pick something up, and don’t need help so I don’t have to wait, that would be peachy.
Retail technology
It would be really interesting to see Apple experiment with more technological solutions to the problems they’re facing, even if that means someone isn’t handed off between three people with colorful t-shirts for that personal touch. Amazon is perhaps too impersonal, and too invasive in their retail efforts, but it’s had some retail ideas that are worth toying with.
A major obstacle to me buying an iPhone these last two years was how the iPhone would physically arrive in my possession. After I moved in 2020 I haven’t had much faith in parcel services. Yes, ordering for home delivery is the only way to interact with zero people when buying a product from Apple—but it’s also the way that items get delivered at weird unreliable times, and placed in public view. For most orders, it’s not a big deal, but for orders over a thousand dollars? It’s a little unnerving. Particularly if I am not going to be home for more than a day in that wide delivery window.
Amazon solved this problem years ago with Amazon lockers. Other retailers followed suit. Even retailers that don’t have physical lockers will let you ship an item to a store for pick up. Apple doesn’t do that. An item can be purchased from a store if it’s going to be in that store’s inventory, but if that item is not projected to be in inventory then that item can’t be purchased for that store at all.
That leads to the weird situations where a customer must check various iPhone configuration colors and their availability at stores in a certain radius. Visibility into a particular Apple Store location’s inventory is not getting me to purchase an iPhone when that inventory is empty. Can’t we do this like civilized adults?
Your oak table is ready
Another innovation Apple could crib from is appointment reservation systems. I’ve lost count of the number of times my boyfriend or I have shown up at an appointed time to an Apple Store to talk to the iPad employee out front, only to be told that there would be a long wait—often more than an hour.
I like to think that a reservation should mean something, but if things really do start backing up, couldn’t Apple alert me to tell me that my item isn’t ready?
If we want to go absolutely wild with this wishcasting: Even when there isn’t an appointed pick up time, and there’s a broader window, why not let me share my location with the Apple Store so as I park someone can start getting my order ready to go? It’s valet parking, but for iPhone boxes. I really just want my stuff.
This is the core of my ridiculous, unreasonable demand for Apple Store reform: I want to give you money faster and more often. It shouldn’t be this frustrating.
[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]
