Retailer - Apple did this out of desperation and if they had not, they may not have survived. They're the poster child of doing retail correctly.
Retail used to be an area where Apple shined. But this is another area where I think they have lost focus in recent years. Some of this is not entirely Apple’s fault. As their products have become more popular, their stores have become much more crowded, which degrades the retail experience. But there are a number of changes made by Angela Ahrendts that have made their retail experience worse.
Example: yesterday, I decided to pull the trigger and give AirPods a try. I placed my order online and selected my local store for pickup since they had just gotten new stock in. I walk into the store and tell the door greeter/filter person why I’m there. She scans my QR code and asks me to wait by a table of iPads while someone brings them out from the back. So far so good. The store is actually not crowded for once and I figure this will only take a minute. I see at least 3 Apple employees loitering around in the general vicinity of the table I’m standing at, not doing anything because the store isn’t busy. And there is one Apple employee checking out a customer buying an iPhone at the table I’m standing at.
Here’s where things go off the rails: they bring out my AirPods and put them next to the guy checking out the iPhone customer. Apparently he’s the designated “check out guy” right now and he tells me there’s also a walk-in AirPods customer ahead of me and I’ll have to wait to be checked out. The iPhone customer wants a screen protector applied, so his transaction is going to take a few mins. The part that annoys me is the other 3 Apple employees, all within earshot, make no move to step in and help. They’re assigned to sales, not check out. It’s not that I mind waiting a few mins. But in their original incarnation, Apple store employees had the freedom and were encouraged to step in and help a customer, even if it wasn’t their assigned duty at that moment. Now it feels like there is very much a “stay in your lane” mentality that has caused experiences like this to become more common for me over the past few years. Also, it feels like a higher percentage of staff are now assigned to sales, which really makes buying and checking out for small items like this a bit of a nightmare.
The Genius Bar experience has also degraded. It used to be you could walk in same day and get your device looked at and fixed or swapped out. Now you generally have to wait days to get an appointment and there seem to be more and more repairs that require your device to be shipped off site. It’s a minor irritant. But the knowledge that I could get fast, friendly service just by going to a store used to be one of my main justifications for paying the high price of Apple’s hardware.
Some of the recent changes, like the Today at Apple Series, are not necessarily bad. But they’ve come at the expense of the core retail experience. Examples like the one I mentioned above are a small annoyance by themselves. But over time they can really sap the goodwill of a brand. I think Apple is dancing dangerously close to that point, and they seem to be doing it to try and drive more sales. That’s a pretty shortsighted strategy.
