The Apple Store. Wow.

I headed over to the flagship Apple store today on Market St., eager to catch a presentation of the Bay Area Photobloggers. After 5 minutes of confusion upon my arrival, I realized what you probably noticed if you followed any of these links--I was two weeks early.

The strange part was that I couldn't leave the store. It is brilliantly designed to tempt you to touch and play with all of their products (and people were--in some cases, lining up to try them!) There is no ugly inventory in view nor security gates and cash registers blocking the exits--just products (computers, laptops, iPods, iPod speakers, printers, etc) and Apple "geniuses" (in addition to those roaming the floor downstairs, upstairs is a "genius bar", where people line up to talk to a dozen or more friendly Apple experts, and a small open theater--complete with theater-style seats--where they were giving a free class).

And the products weren't just there in their stupid "fresh out of the box" (useless) state. They were neatly organized around activities (movies, music, work, etc.) and filled with content: the iPods had songs and pictures, the laptop address books had names, iMovie had video clips in it. I was editing movies, flipping through pictures, comparing the sound from iPod speaker docks. A friendly Apple Genius even set up a video chat for me with a laptop across the room so I could see if looked as good as it did when Jobs demo'ed it (it did, though it was just the local network).

It's really a minor miracle that I didn't walk out of there with anything. Truth be told, the only reason I didn't was because I had read earlier today a rumor that we would soon see 2GB iPod shuffles, so I decided to wait. I'm not sure that I'll last, though, if I stumble into that store again.

I hope other retailers are learning from Apple (I hear that Sony has a similar style store, too, so I'll have to check that out). The Apple stores have been a huge success where others (e.g. the Gateway stores) have failed. As with everything else they do, Apple really thought about the entire experience for "users" of the store and brilliantly designed every aspect of it. It's a toy store for yuppies (and I learned at an Apple presentation in Cupertino in January that the numbers verify that the stores have offered phenomenal ROI). I wonder how much better a Best Buy or Circuit City would perform if they were a bit smarter about their retail experience.

Kudos to Apple for this great business move.

joel