Running 37 days
without a restart.

The Grand Opening of the Apple Store in Woodfield by Michael Coyle

This is the second Apple branded store I have been to in the Chicagoland area. The first was in 1984 on Michigan Avenue, not far from where the next area store will open in a few months. I was a twenty-one year old assistant engineer barely making ten-thousand a year and walked into the store to see a Fat Mac selling for over $3000. The sales people wouldn't give me the time of day, and shortly thereafter, the store went out of business.

Would these new Apple Stores fare any better?

Located in the Woodfield Mall outside of Chicago, the mall is so successful that local residents do not pay property taxes. I arrived with the family at 8:30 am. The Grand Opening was scheduled for 9 o'clock and there were already over 500 people in line.

The gentleman who had the distinction of being the first to enter arrived at 3 am in the dead of night to sleep outside the mall in a lawn chair. Most arrived at 6:30 when the mall officially opens its doors to accommodate the hordes of seniors who walk the concourses for exercise.

Apple employees walked along the line of customers passing out bottles of Evian, shooting video of the cheering crowd, and demonstrating MacOS X from iBooks. There were half a dozen security guards to manage the serpentine line and one said he had never seen anything like this.

Every spring, Chicago Cubs' fans brave the cold and spend the night in front of Wrigley field in hopes of getting some choice seats for the year. Those baseball fans could learn a few tricks from this Apple crowd. Every 20 feet there was a patron with a Powerbook open playing a game or swapping digital pictures. Two men used an ethernet crossover cable to link together a Mac and PC for a game of Quake!

By eleven o'clock, the Coyle family finally entered the doorway. The two kids were told they could each buy a game while daddy went around setting ResExcellence as the default home page on all the computers (just kidding, really I am).

As expected, the displays in the store were beautiful. Just as at Macworld, everything is brightly lit while computers sit on milky white plastic. There were plenty of software titles on the racks and additional displays for third party printers and MP3 players.

Several times during our visit to the store, a hand truck was needed to wheel out several large purchases of hardware. One guy left with three Titanium Powerbooks! I found this surprising since better deals can be found online and through catalog resellers. You would think the Mac fanatic who would wait two hours in line to enter the store would already know this!

The best part of the entire experience was the checkout counter. Two iMacs ran what appeared to be FileMaker Pro databases doing duty as cash registers. There were a lot of nice little touches. For example, the small LCD display that you sign for a credit card purchase had the Apple logo on the screen.

Every customer received a t-shirt and if you made a purchase you also received an Apple note pad. From the receipt to the plastic bags, it's apparent that this company understands how iconic the Apple brand is. I have been to the Sony store and Disney Quest, and Apple has out-branded both these companies.

Even with the long wait, the entire family enjoyed being part of the event. But still, I have some concerns about the viability of these Apple Stores. No where were there any deals to be had. I don't believe we will ever see a big red "ON SALE" sign in the front window.

Apple says these stores will be profitable, but just as in 1981, will Apple once again be perceived as the computer for people who will pay a little more for the very best? While that attitude works well for Starbucks and Lexus, it doesn't sound like a formula for grabbing marketshare.

Instead of Apple stores, I wish the company would make more of relationships such as the one they have with CompUSA. Placing Apple employees in these stores should make a significant difference. I would not be surprised if a single Apple employee in a CompUSA outsells the entire Apple store on a given weekend.

With Gateway's recent troubles with retail stores, it's a gutsy move for Apple to buck the trend and launch into brick-and-mortar retail. The stores are beautiful and manned with intelligent employees. I just hope they're not afraid to hang the occasional "ON SALE" sign in the front window.