After a surveillance video surfaced on the Internet showing a visitor walking into a ultra-clear Apple store display window, the company has made a major concession to its architectural design by installing warning stickers on its storefront windows. A key architectural concept for Apple’s stores is to erase the boundary between the sidewalk and the interior of its retail stores. This is accomplished by using expensive, low-iron glass that is nearly invisible, and by eliminating window frames or other boundary features. In some cases the front glass drops into the floor and has no visible frame that might warn pedestrians of the glass. In the March 2010 video that appeared on several Web sites, a woman walks down the side aisle of an unknown store, directly towards a conspicuous iPhone window display. She walks slightly left to avoid the display and strikes the glass. She bounces back and off the side wall, and then falls backwards to the floor. Several people run to her aid, including store staffers. It’s not clear if the woman was injured by her collision. A similar incident was witnessed by several people waiting in line for the Lincoln Park (Ill.) store grand opening last year. A woman walked into the window the night before the opening, suffering a severe nosebleed. She was treated and released by a Chicago Fire Department ambulance squad. There is currently no national requirement or standard for installing glass warning stickers, except on automatically-operated doors.
This video appeared on the Web, taken from an unknown store in March 2010.
After a visitor window collision, Apple installed rectangular window warning stickers along the width of the front store windows, as show here highlighted in yellow.
E-mail this story
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Next Comments →
Ideas to prevent this again :
Put apple logos on the windows big enough for a older person to see . 1. Make the entire window a display area, even with boxes from display macs, that way if they see the boxes, they won’t try walking through them. as for sliding doors put a warning sliding glass door on the glass or a sign saying. ” caution ” doors are glass make sure it is open to prevent injury.
that bitch that was standing so close to the old lady wouldnt even help her out. What a dumb bitch.
that’s the apple store i go to at my mall in towson. i hope she was ok.
I walked into an Apple store here in the the UK to buying a car charger for my iPhone. However it was the wrong one and I had to return to the shop to exchange the product. Unfortunately, although I went into the shop twice I only came out once because I heavily impacted with an invisible glass door. Unfortunately, the left door had been shut during the few minutes after I had returned to the shop and I walked into it at 4.5 mph, almost knocking myself unconscious. I sustained a serious blow to my right forehead and later developed serious, painful neck and shoulder syndromes similar to a whiplash type injury. The staff were not trained properly to assist me to deal with my injury – in short, they were pathetic. I had the presence of mind to take photographs and later realised when looking at the photographs that my impact with the door was inevitable the glass being entirely invisible to the naked eye. Over here, Apple markets their products via the ‘Stormfront’ brand and this company operates its stores with similar transparent glass features to that of the US Apple operation. However, UK Health and Safety laws require that vertical glass in hazardous areas is appropriately marked with clearly visible design features or hazard motifs. Features could be structural features, such as transoms, or clearly visible risers or edge sections as part of the door’s integral design; and, hazard motifs should clearly delineate vertical glass boundaries. Such minimalist designs inevitably increase risk for the public who visit the stores and who, quite reasonably, expect that their health and safety would have been considered by those responsible for conducting the store’s risk assessment. It may seem comical, almost ‘Chaplinesque’, when people walk into lampposts or the side of a bus; however, these items are normally clearly visible whereas glass, unless officially marked, is normally invisible. Serious injuries can result from such impacts.
Finally, the store here in Salisbury, Wiltshire is required by the terms of its risk assessment to ensure the doors are kept open during the shop’s trading hours. The company is attempting to deny liability despite a clear breach of their risk assessment conditions and health and safety legislation. In short, I hope Stormfront go bust! (I am buying a Samsung Galaxy for my next phone).
{ 49 trackbacks }