Thursday, July 03, 2003
Reporting from the Apple Store Boca Raton Grand Opening
No, I'm not posting this from one of the display machines inside Apple's new store in Boca Raton, Florida. And no, I'm not posting this from my own laptop while sitting out front of the Apple Store, borrowing its wireless signal. For that matter, I'm not even in South Florida right now -- but that's another story altogether. Suffice it so say that I've lost all grip on reality when I delayed my Fourth of July plans just so I could attend the Grand Opening. But despite having been on the road for the past three hours and having had plenty of time to take in what I witnessed this evening at Town Center Mall, I still don't believe what I saw while I was there. There's just no way that there could be that many people interested in a computer store, especially on a holiday weekend. Or perhaps South Florida has more Mac fanatics that I could ever have imagined -- in which case, I need to print up some more business cards.
I arrived at 4:30 this evening for the 6:00 opening, and found a dozen Mac users sitting in the relaxation area nearest to the Apple storefront. How did I know that they were Mac users? Most of them had Mac laptops with them and were tapping into Apple's wireless stream to kill the time. Why didn't I think of that? At around 5:00, employees placed ropes out front of the store, telling us that it was time to act like sheep and form a line. In a smug display of "we're Mac users, we own this mall now" antics, many of those who had been sitting in chairs simply dragged their chairs into line with them and continued to sit down for the rest of the waiting period. At around 5:15, two suits from the Mayor's Jewelers came out to ensure that the suddenly growing line snaked away from their storefont and not in front of it. I found this ironic, because there were literally no customers in their jewelry store at the time. They could have taken the opportunity to pass out flyers, or bring out some fancy necklace and show it off, but instead they simply wanted to make sure that their (total lack of) customers had access to their (completely empty) store. But I digress.
At 5:30, a companion arrived, allowing me to sneak out of line and take a really rough head-count of the line, and I came up with 120 people. I noted for the record that this was already more people than had been in line at both of the other South Florida Apple Stores, The Falls and Wellington Green, at the time the doors opened (more on this later). Just before 6:00, I took anouther, even rougher headcount, and came up with 250 warm bodies in line. I jumped back in line just in time to enter the store and be greeted by the customary high-fives from the employees, and step into a store that was about to test every fire code in the State of Florida. The people just kept pouring in, like a moshpit at Lollapalooza. Yet somehow, in all the chaos, the employees actually managed to do their jobs. Standing in the middle of the store, I could hear bits and pieces of dozens of simultaneous Mac-related conversations among employees and customers that ranged from the merits of Dreamweaver MX to burning speeds under Toast Titanium. Clearly, it wasn't just about Apple products; it was about servicing the entire Macintosh experience, from top to bottom.
T-shirts were distributed to customers as they left, which should have served as an enticement for customers to, you know, get the heck out of the store. But at 7:00, an hour after the doors opened, officials were still rationing who could get in, and there were still at least fifty people waiting behind the ropes. Some of those in line didn't even appear to know what they were in line for. They just saw a huge line and decided to join in. But then, this was the whole idea, was it not? Put stores in high-traffic malls so that passers-by will unwittingly expose themselves to the Apple bug, and hopefully get so severely infected that they end up buying the cure, in the form of a Macintosh. Which leads me to my big question: why on earth did it take Apple two years to put a store in this mall, first opting for two lesser-traveled malls in the process?
South Florida is a patch of urbania on the Atlantic Ocean that runs a good seventy-five miles north to south, but never more than ten or twenty miles east to west (due to a small hindrance out west called the Everglades). Apple's first store in South Florida "missed" the urban patch rather severely. Miami is generally considered the south end of the metropolitan area, yet The Falls is a good half-hour further south! Not that there isn't a good deal of foot traffic down there, it's just that you don't generally try to service an area by placing your location at one extreme end of that area. Apple tried again a year later, but essentially missed again, this time to the north. Wellington Green is a very nice mall, and (despite being a smaller store) had a lot more people in line at its Grand Opening than The Falls did. But Apple left such an obvious glaring hole in its South Florida retail strategy that even an old pal of mine who lives 1500 miles away from here was writing to me from time to time, saying "when is Apple finally going to put a store in Town Center?".
Well, he finally got his wish today. So why did it take so long? The obvious assumption would be that Apple simply misjudged the South Florida landscape, not realizing that it had ignored a full two hours' worth of urban terrian between its first two locations. But Apple's usually a lot smarter than this, so let's look at what the long-term strategy might have been from the start. The Falls was slammed rather mercilessly by Hurricane Andrew eleven years ago, and took quite a long time to gradually rebuild its base of stores. Is it possible that Apple simply got a fantasic deal on the rent that it couldn't pass up? Wellington Green, on the other hand, was a brand new mall, so there was obviously no trouble finding retail space there. Maybe Apple just decided to plop into this mall because it was, you know, there.
But that all seems fishy. It's just not Apple's style to settle for less desirable locations to save a buck. My scooby sense tells me that this was all part of a plan to give Apple Retail enough time to figure out what it was doing, and enough time to become en vogue, before it opened the locations it really wanted to be in. At this evening's opening, there was a rather masterful fluidity to how the employees were going about their business, one that was difficult to describe but unmistakably different from the opening days at the two older stores. And the display machines seemed to be set up in ways that kept customers glued to them, oohing and ahing all too often for their own good. Every display machine had hundreds of photos pre-loaded into it, for instance, which allowed employees to show off, let's say an iPhoto book or the iMovie Ken Burns Effect. Back on the opening day of the store at The Falls, I vividly remember snapping a photo of myself using the digital camera that was attached to one of the Macs, just so that I could actually have a digital photo to play with. In fact, back then, iPhoto didn't even exist yet. But this evening, all I had to do to show the Ken Burns Effect to my companion was to launch iMovie, click on the "photos" tab, and choose a photo from among the ones that were already in place. It's a subtle difference, but when trying to wow someone into understanding the great advantages of the Mac platform, it could quite possibly make all the difference.
"OK, South Florida. Hmm, let's put two stores in the periphery, one up at the north end and one way down on the south end, and then we'll work on moving into the prime targets. By then, we'll be a hot commodity and we can get any location we want at any mall we want." Is this what Apple Retail was thinking from the start? Acoording to this article in the Pioneer Press, Apple is now getting exactly that kind of treatment when it approaches shopping malls about wanting to move in. Boca's Town Center is one hopping-mad mall overall, but there's one end of the mall that seems to be about fourteen times more popular than the other. When I heard about Apple's Town Center plans, I was worried that Apple would end up settling for any floor space it could get. For the life of me, I can't remember what store moved out of the location that Apple moved into, but it's what I would consider one of the prime locations in the whole mall. It's just around the corner from the food court, comfortably in between two popular anchors. That's not bad, considering that this mall is in a suburban area that's more densely packed than most metropolises (is that really how you pluralize that word?). I'd bet this store will do more annual sales than the other two South Florida Apple Stores combined, just based on incidental traffic and proximity to, you know, people.
Apple Stores are getting smarter in other ways as well. On the Genius Bar was a stack of flyers promoting a local Apple User Group. And on the wall was a giant sign that read something along the lines of "The State of Maine put an iBook in the hands of every one of its seventh graders. Shouldn't you do the same?" You go, Apple. Let the world know what other, more clued-in State governments are doing in education. Make it easier for the rest of us educators to keep our Macs when the clueless come knocking. Come to think of it, the exact same sign was on the wall when I was at The Falls to watch the WWDC Keynote last week. It would appear that Apple's not content to merely make the newer stores better; it's improving the older ones along the way as well.
And here, you thought this column was just going to be a short little column about a Grand Opening. I guess those three hours on the road gave me more time to think about the whole retail thing than I had originally realized. Am I reading more into it than what's really there? Quite possibly. But based on the pattern I've seen in the past two years, I'm already taking bets on where the next South Florida Apple Store might be. To paraphrase Denzel Washington's character in Training Day, "King Kong ain't got nothing on Apple Retail".
Got something to say about Apple's retail strategy, or your own Fourth of July barbecuing strategy? Throw me a bone.
No, I'm not posting this from one of the display machines inside Apple's new store in Boca Raton, Florida. And no, I'm not posting this from my own laptop while sitting out front of the Apple Store, borrowing its wireless signal. For that matter, I'm not even in South Florida right now -- but that's another story altogether. Suffice it so say that I've lost all grip on reality when I delayed my Fourth of July plans just so I could attend the Grand Opening. But despite having been on the road for the past three hours and having had plenty of time to take in what I witnessed this evening at Town Center Mall, I still don't believe what I saw while I was there. There's just no way that there could be that many people interested in a computer store, especially on a holiday weekend. Or perhaps South Florida has more Mac fanatics that I could ever have imagined -- in which case, I need to print up some more business cards.
I arrived at 4:30 this evening for the 6:00 opening, and found a dozen Mac users sitting in the relaxation area nearest to the Apple storefront. How did I know that they were Mac users? Most of them had Mac laptops with them and were tapping into Apple's wireless stream to kill the time. Why didn't I think of that? At around 5:00, employees placed ropes out front of the store, telling us that it was time to act like sheep and form a line. In a smug display of "we're Mac users, we own this mall now" antics, many of those who had been sitting in chairs simply dragged their chairs into line with them and continued to sit down for the rest of the waiting period. At around 5:15, two suits from the Mayor's Jewelers came out to ensure that the suddenly growing line snaked away from their storefont and not in front of it. I found this ironic, because there were literally no customers in their jewelry store at the time. They could have taken the opportunity to pass out flyers, or bring out some fancy necklace and show it off, but instead they simply wanted to make sure that their (total lack of) customers had access to their (completely empty) store. But I digress.
At 5:30, a companion arrived, allowing me to sneak out of line and take a really rough head-count of the line, and I came up with 120 people. I noted for the record that this was already more people than had been in line at both of the other South Florida Apple Stores, The Falls and Wellington Green, at the time the doors opened (more on this later). Just before 6:00, I took anouther, even rougher headcount, and came up with 250 warm bodies in line. I jumped back in line just in time to enter the store and be greeted by the customary high-fives from the employees, and step into a store that was about to test every fire code in the State of Florida. The people just kept pouring in, like a moshpit at Lollapalooza. Yet somehow, in all the chaos, the employees actually managed to do their jobs. Standing in the middle of the store, I could hear bits and pieces of dozens of simultaneous Mac-related conversations among employees and customers that ranged from the merits of Dreamweaver MX to burning speeds under Toast Titanium. Clearly, it wasn't just about Apple products; it was about servicing the entire Macintosh experience, from top to bottom.
T-shirts were distributed to customers as they left, which should have served as an enticement for customers to, you know, get the heck out of the store. But at 7:00, an hour after the doors opened, officials were still rationing who could get in, and there were still at least fifty people waiting behind the ropes. Some of those in line didn't even appear to know what they were in line for. They just saw a huge line and decided to join in. But then, this was the whole idea, was it not? Put stores in high-traffic malls so that passers-by will unwittingly expose themselves to the Apple bug, and hopefully get so severely infected that they end up buying the cure, in the form of a Macintosh. Which leads me to my big question: why on earth did it take Apple two years to put a store in this mall, first opting for two lesser-traveled malls in the process?
South Florida is a patch of urbania on the Atlantic Ocean that runs a good seventy-five miles north to south, but never more than ten or twenty miles east to west (due to a small hindrance out west called the Everglades). Apple's first store in South Florida "missed" the urban patch rather severely. Miami is generally considered the south end of the metropolitan area, yet The Falls is a good half-hour further south! Not that there isn't a good deal of foot traffic down there, it's just that you don't generally try to service an area by placing your location at one extreme end of that area. Apple tried again a year later, but essentially missed again, this time to the north. Wellington Green is a very nice mall, and (despite being a smaller store) had a lot more people in line at its Grand Opening than The Falls did. But Apple left such an obvious glaring hole in its South Florida retail strategy that even an old pal of mine who lives 1500 miles away from here was writing to me from time to time, saying "when is Apple finally going to put a store in Town Center?".
Well, he finally got his wish today. So why did it take so long? The obvious assumption would be that Apple simply misjudged the South Florida landscape, not realizing that it had ignored a full two hours' worth of urban terrian between its first two locations. But Apple's usually a lot smarter than this, so let's look at what the long-term strategy might have been from the start. The Falls was slammed rather mercilessly by Hurricane Andrew eleven years ago, and took quite a long time to gradually rebuild its base of stores. Is it possible that Apple simply got a fantasic deal on the rent that it couldn't pass up? Wellington Green, on the other hand, was a brand new mall, so there was obviously no trouble finding retail space there. Maybe Apple just decided to plop into this mall because it was, you know, there.
But that all seems fishy. It's just not Apple's style to settle for less desirable locations to save a buck. My scooby sense tells me that this was all part of a plan to give Apple Retail enough time to figure out what it was doing, and enough time to become en vogue, before it opened the locations it really wanted to be in. At this evening's opening, there was a rather masterful fluidity to how the employees were going about their business, one that was difficult to describe but unmistakably different from the opening days at the two older stores. And the display machines seemed to be set up in ways that kept customers glued to them, oohing and ahing all too often for their own good. Every display machine had hundreds of photos pre-loaded into it, for instance, which allowed employees to show off, let's say an iPhoto book or the iMovie Ken Burns Effect. Back on the opening day of the store at The Falls, I vividly remember snapping a photo of myself using the digital camera that was attached to one of the Macs, just so that I could actually have a digital photo to play with. In fact, back then, iPhoto didn't even exist yet. But this evening, all I had to do to show the Ken Burns Effect to my companion was to launch iMovie, click on the "photos" tab, and choose a photo from among the ones that were already in place. It's a subtle difference, but when trying to wow someone into understanding the great advantages of the Mac platform, it could quite possibly make all the difference.
"OK, South Florida. Hmm, let's put two stores in the periphery, one up at the north end and one way down on the south end, and then we'll work on moving into the prime targets. By then, we'll be a hot commodity and we can get any location we want at any mall we want." Is this what Apple Retail was thinking from the start? Acoording to this article in the Pioneer Press, Apple is now getting exactly that kind of treatment when it approaches shopping malls about wanting to move in. Boca's Town Center is one hopping-mad mall overall, but there's one end of the mall that seems to be about fourteen times more popular than the other. When I heard about Apple's Town Center plans, I was worried that Apple would end up settling for any floor space it could get. For the life of me, I can't remember what store moved out of the location that Apple moved into, but it's what I would consider one of the prime locations in the whole mall. It's just around the corner from the food court, comfortably in between two popular anchors. That's not bad, considering that this mall is in a suburban area that's more densely packed than most metropolises (is that really how you pluralize that word?). I'd bet this store will do more annual sales than the other two South Florida Apple Stores combined, just based on incidental traffic and proximity to, you know, people.
Apple Stores are getting smarter in other ways as well. On the Genius Bar was a stack of flyers promoting a local Apple User Group. And on the wall was a giant sign that read something along the lines of "The State of Maine put an iBook in the hands of every one of its seventh graders. Shouldn't you do the same?" You go, Apple. Let the world know what other, more clued-in State governments are doing in education. Make it easier for the rest of us educators to keep our Macs when the clueless come knocking. Come to think of it, the exact same sign was on the wall when I was at The Falls to watch the WWDC Keynote last week. It would appear that Apple's not content to merely make the newer stores better; it's improving the older ones along the way as well.
And here, you thought this column was just going to be a short little column about a Grand Opening. I guess those three hours on the road gave me more time to think about the whole retail thing than I had originally realized. Am I reading more into it than what's really there? Quite possibly. But based on the pattern I've seen in the past two years, I'm already taking bets on where the next South Florida Apple Store might be. To paraphrase Denzel Washington's character in Training Day, "King Kong ain't got nothing on Apple Retail".
Got something to say about Apple's retail strategy, or your own Fourth of July barbecuing strategy? Throw me a bone.
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