Video: Apple employees pumped up for holiday sales
This promises to be a huge Christmas for Apple (AAPL) — what with new iPods, a new Mac OS, and the new iPhone — and the 200 or so Apple Stores will play a key part in moving the merchandise.
These retail outlets are cash machines. More than 100 million people moved through the stores in the fiscal year that ended in September, generating about $4.2 billion of the company’s $24 billion annual revenue.
The stores are also showcases, both for the company’s products — jewel-like devices that need to be seen and played with to be appreciated — and for its legendary commitment to service and support. The staff are unfailingly courteous and helpful, enthusiastic evangelists for the cause.
Sometimes, they’re a bit too enthusiastic. Witness the video below shot by a British user who braved freezing temperatures to attend the opening of the company’s new Exeter store last week. Matt Aiken, who has a blog called Lost in Tech, describes the scene:
about 15 minutes before the store opened the staff began to hype up the crowd running up and down like loonatics, shouting and whooping. All a bit to much for some of the more reserved people in the queue, the guy next to me threatened to pull a moonie if they didn’t shut up! The opening was done in a similar fashion - watch the youtube video I made below sorry it’s a bit jerky.
ADDENDUM: Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster and his staff spent six hours Thanksgiving weekend monitoring the traffic at “normal” sized American Apple Stores in the East and Midwest. Quantifying the “gravitational pull” the stores have on nearby customers, they report that “27% of people walking within 25ft of an Apple store entrance actually entered the store.” Muster concludes:
We note Apple stores are typically located in central, high traffic areas of a mall. Only a fraction of shoppers actually purchased anything from the Apple stores. The important point is this gravitational pull highlights that consumers’ future buying intentions could be shifting to Apple from PCs. If materialized, this shift should benefit Apple in 2008 and 2009.
For more detail from Piper Jaffray’s report, see AppleInsider here.
You may find interesting the exclusive interview I published today with Alex Frankel, the author of “Punching In.” It’s an account of front-line jobs he had at companies like Gap, Starbucks, UPS and Apple during a two-year project. We cover specifically his Apple Store insights here:
Author interview: “Punching In” at the Apple Store
http://counternotions.com/2007/11/26/punching-in-interview/
All of those people excited about the opening and who does Phil quote? The one guy annoyed. Way to dig them up Phil.
ex ped: I quote the one guy who wrote it up and provided a video. I searched for other eye-witness reports, but his was all I found. For what it’s worth, this is what he wrote on his Digg posting:
“I cobbled together a video in bad shaky quality - so you can view the full cheesy hi-fiveness, going to get some photos up as quickly as possible.” (link)
And this is how he was quoted in Macworld.com (stripped, you will please notice, of any hint of annoyance):
“I could see the full extent of the queue, and to be honest it was pretty insane for a UK store. 30 minutes after going in, we came out and the queue was still horrendously long, with people being cheered as they went in. You certainly don’t see that kind of line waiting for any other store to open, it really brings home the successful marketing of the Apple Retail machine,” Aiken wrote. (link)
–Philip Elmer-DeWitt
I wish that my employees were so enthusiastic!
Yes, very courteous and helpful at the Stanford Mall store. Try the University Apple Store and you can the creeping arrogance, and disregard for customers, especially at the Genius Bar.
“Video: Apple employees pumped up for holiday sales”
Headline is misleading like always.
Should read: Apple employees were pumped up to open a new store in Exeter.
[ex ped: Sigh.]
More errors for you to correct, nothing changed here either.
“This promises be a huge Christmas for Apple (AAPL) — what with new iPods, a new Mac OS, and the new iPhone — and the 200 or so Apple Stores will play a key part in moving the merchandise.”
“what with new”????
This sentence doesn’t make sense.
[ex ped: "what with" is a colloquialism in American English. Do a Google search for "what with things" and you'll find lots of examples, e.g. "It’s hard as hell to keep the herds healthy out here, what with things the way they are on the range." --Philip Elmer-DeWitt]
“200 or so Apple Stores will play a key part in moving the merchandise.”
What about the online store?
[ex ped: This was a post about Apple's retail stores. The online store moves merchandise too, but doesn't give you videos of Apple employees gone wild. --Philip Elmer-DeWitt]
That’s your typical Apple store oppening alright!
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Silicon Valley veterans like to joke that Steve Jobs must be surrounded by a reality distortion field; if you get too close to him, you start to believe what he's saying. Thanks to the success of the iPod, the launch of the iPhone and the renewed interest in the Mac, Apple has made believers out of millions of customers - and made a lot of investors rich. But Philip Elmer-DeWitt believes that an ounce of skepticism never hurts when writing about the company. He should know. He's been covering Apple - and watching Steve Jobs operate - since 1982, first for Time Magazine, then for Business 2.0, and now for Fortune.
The (in)famous Dutch service ethic extends to the Amsterdam apple store, “The staff are unfailingly courteous and helpful, enthusiastic evangelists for the cause.” is sadly lacking..