At Apple stores around the world, it’s all about congestion, as more visitors flock to the stores, stay longer and use the display Macs for their personal computing needs. At Apple’s HQ, the talk is all about how crowded the stores have become and how to keep the service level high despite the lingering crowds. A survey of stores points to how and why they are jammed.
The accompanying graph show the relative quarterly increase of store visitors as the number of stores has increased since 2003, and as interest in Apple’s products has increased. Obviously, the trend is up, with some high-profile stores hosting hundreds of thousands of visitors a week.
Apple execs have always said they want the stores to be considered public spaces, and have encouraged visitors to check their e-mail, surf the Web, and even engage in iChats with the friends and family back home when they’re traveling. At the same time, having lots of visitors and activity within your stores isn’t exactly considered a curse within the retail community. Most retailers would rather have too many visitors than too few, even if they don’t make purchases.
At the Apple stores, the most obvious congestion occurs at the stores’ Genius Bars, where appointment times fill up fast, especially at high-profile stores and on weekends. It’s not uncommon to find all appointments booked by noon or sooner, even at smaller stores.
Meanwhile, what’s clogging up the tables where Apple products are on display for sale? Surveys of stores on both coasts show amazingly similar results: up to 60% of the people standing at a display computer are conducting personal business, and not checking the features of the hardware or software. Exactly what are they doing?
At one small store, a group of five teen girls actively crowded around an iMac for over 45 minutes, taking picture after picture of themselves with the PhotoBooth application–definitely too provocative to post. When they were done, there were 98 photos on file for anyone to look at, and–by the way–a record within Apple’s Mail program of any snaps they sent to friends, including the recipient’s e-mail address.
At the high-profile SoHo store on a weekday, 35 of the 59 display computers, or 59%, were occupied by persons doing personal business: e-mail, job sites, FaceBook, MySpace and other Web sites that require log-ins. The front table display of then-brand new MacBooks was jammed with people who weren’t examining the new computers, but who were all conducting personal business. Only two of the 8 people left within a 6-minute period. One man worked on a new black MacBook for 20 minutes. When he finished, he left behind a Safari history screen full of job search sites, including one listing on Craigslist for a person to “Hand Out Flyers.”
Similar activity was found at west coast stores, where the majority of people using a computer were logged into a personal account conducting business, not trying out the computer for purchase. It’s not impossible to find store visitors visiting adult and X-rated Web sites, or posting four-letter words posted in word processing documents just for the heck of it. Of course, there is also the issue of visitors coming to the store to download software from the computers onto an iPod.
Anyone examining the Safari history on display computers will find long lists of visits to MySpace, Hotmail, YouTube and StupidVideo sites. Other history screens contain a miscellany of visited sites.
To combat a huge increase in visitors, retailers typically add more stores or increase their hours. In Apple’s case, the company surprised many in the retail community when they announced that the new Fifth Avenue (NYC) store would be open 24 hours-a-day, 365 days-a-week. Sr. V-P Retail Ron Johnson explained to a reporter that the existing SoHo store opens at 6 a.m. and closes at midnight–another six hours wasn’t much of an increase in hours, he said.
According to insiders, this new 24-hour concept will be rolled out to some other existing stores over the next year. Besides accommodating more visitors, the longer hours will also help speed the repair and service of equipment that customers bring to the Genius Bar. For example, at Fifth Avenue, laptop repairs, which are always more time-consuming, are being performed on-site to help return computers to their owners sooner.
