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AUGUST 30, 2002 NEWSMAKER Q&A The Little Bugs in Apple's Stores Retail guru, Machead, and author Paco Underhill loves the consumer-friendly emporiums, but he says Jobs & Co. should do some fine-tuning
His Apple curiosity has taken him into a handful of the computing company's retail establishments. BusinessWeek Online Technology Editor Alex Salkever spoke to Underhill recently to get his impression of Apple's retail attack (see BW Online Special Report, "Can Apple Keep Rolling?"). Here are edited excerpts of that conversation: Q: What are your general impressions of Apple's stores? A: I like them. Apple has always been a bit of a religion. Part of what has always been missing was a temple. People who are into Macs have never had a place to call their own. We have always been delegated to some corner of an electronics store. The user group was a floating temple and not quite the same. What Apple has done now is build a broad enough range of products that a store makes a lot of sense. Between the screens, the iPods, the printers, and the actual computers, it's a lot to look at. There is enough stuff that people can come in and get a sense of what the religion is all about. Beyond that, part of the job of the store is helping people move from novices to acolytes and acolytes to deacons. As pervasive a presence as Apple has established on the Web, it has missed having some physical place -- just in the same way Gateway having a physical place helped lots of people who weren't able to navigate their way through the process on the Web. Q: Give me an example? A: Sure. I bought an Apple Airport [wireless networking] system. And I could never get it to work. I went online. I asked questions. Nothing. I walk into the Apple store. The person says "Fine, bring it in, and I'll fix it." It was really wonderful. It was the solution of last resort, and the attitude was so positive that it took something that had generated a lot of frustration and made me walk away with a sense of satisfaction. And I contrasted that with some of the experiences you have in dealing with stores of wireless phone companies, such as Verizon or Sprint. One of the things you often feel in them is a sense of tension because they are the solution of last resort for angry people. That's something I haven't gotten in the Apple store, and I've spent many hours at them. Q: How could Apple improve its stores? A: One of the things I have been a little disturbed with is they have used the same store and haven't tuned it in the course of opening however many new stores they have opened. I walked into the first one, and I saw some flaws in it. So I spoke with the store manager and walked him through, just as some itinerant nosy customer, not as a consultant. This was in Plano, Tex. And there were lots of things in terms of management of kids, management of families -- how you were supposed to navigate or use the store -- that I thought they could improve on. When I visited another new store at the Short Hills Mall (in New Jersey) that opened up six months later, it was the same layout, same thing. No one seems to have learned from the first one they had opened. A: Anything specific they should reconsider? Q: The placement of the kids' area. They do have a kids' area, but it's not clear if it's a place for selling or a place for parking. Part of what I said is that they need to sit on a skateboard and look at the store from a vantage point of a baby stroller or a five-year-old. There are things that should make more sense from that height, but don't. For customers coming in as families, it's not clear exactly how they should use the stores. In their defense, I have thought the people who worked in the stores were very well trained. The stage set, though, isn't as good as it could be. Q: What other suggestions do you have for Apple? A: They have to make sure they continually remind themselves it's a place for selling things, but it's also a place for building awareness. I would like to see the store increase their role as a place to make people comfortable with their purchases. For example, someone could give a class on how you use your iPod. They are doing that to a certain degree. But they are missing some obvious steps. As someone who has e-mailed Apple with problems, no one from the company has sent me an e-mail telling me, "At your local Apple store you can sign up for a seminar in that topic." The multichannel Apple experience I don't think has been managed as well as it could be. They haven't yet integrated their catalog, physical, and Web presence to a sufficient degree. For more stories on Apple, see BW Online's regular Byte of the Apple column.  Edited by Douglas Harbrecht Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page  | | AUGUST |
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