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A new kind of Apple Store is opening on Saturday.
Across the street from the iconic San Francisco store, Apple is opening a new flagship aimed at being more than just a store. The trademark 42-foot glass doors will open to a kind of Apple-designed public forum, with a conference room, advice for small businesses, concerts, and a layout that blurs the line between inside and outside.
"This is not just a store," Angela Ahrendts, Apple's senior vice president of retail and online stores, said in a Thursday press release. "We want people to say, 'Hey, meet me at Apple.... Did you see what's going on at Apple?"
Apple is not the first business to engaged in an aesthetic revamp for physical store locations. More and more large companies have taken a designer's eye to rebuilding or in some cases building stores to for greater aesthetics, layout, and convenience.
What would you do if you had $100 billion in cash sitting in the bank?
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Tuesday May 24 2016, @07:01PM
Barnes and Noble tried the "not just a store" thing a few years ago. They had seats. Tables. They wanted you to bring your laptop and sit around all day. Now all that stuff is gone. And I could afford the things at BN. So if it didn't work for them, will it work for Apple? I mean, I sort of want to go to BN and browse, but I'd only go to an Apple store to buy an expensive gadget. Actually, I'd order it online. But BN seemed to be a perfect fit for this not-a-store concept and it didn't seem to work.
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(Score: 2) by WillR on Tuesday May 24 2016, @07:51PM
Wasn't that the whole problem - people would go to Barnes and Noble, pick up a new book, sit in the nice leather chair to read a chapter, decide they want it, then pull out their laptop and use the free wi-fi to order it on Amazon for $2 less than B&N?
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday May 24 2016, @08:31PM
Sounds about right. B&N's "not just a store" idea was pretty nice, giving it a library-like feel that made it nicer to shop in vs. other places. Every time I went in one, I saw plenty of people making use of the amenities, so it was definitely popular. It didn't change my habits any -- I'd always randomly sample parts of an interesting book -- but it did give me a place to sit while doing it.
The problem with the idea seemed to lie more with Amazon than the idea itself, because like you said, people would sample it in the store and then buy it off Amazon for less. Other retail stores like Target have complained of similar problems, where people use their stores to window-shop, scan barcodes, then buy the items off Amazon. Some stores supposedly even started taking offensive action against to stop it, but I don't know how true that is.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday May 25 2016, @11:42AM
Really? What does that mean, employees would tackle you, or they'd hire hackers to stalk your online behavior and wag their finger at you?
It quite reveals what businesses really think of their customers when they use tactics like that--they have a right to your money, and you should be grateful they allow you to give it to them.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Wednesday May 25 2016, @10:39PM
Really? What does that mean, employees would tackle you, or they'd hire hackers to stalk your online behavior and wag their finger at you?
Nothing quite so aggressive. Mostly I've seen claims occasionally made that some places take deliberate action to reduce signal quality, or that stores offering wifi give degraded performance loading competitor sites, etc. I can't recall seeing any of the claims proven, but I also wouldn't be surprised at all. We've already seen that some hotels and hotel chains have no problems using jammers (illegal!) to block cell reception in order to "encourage" people to pay for hotel wifi, so it's not really so far-fetched even if it hasn't been verified yet.
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Wednesday May 25 2016, @12:33PM
BN can't compete with themselves, let alone Amazon. BN's online prices are significantly cheaper than their store prices. I can't explain why they don't care about their stores.
Over the past few years, book cover prices have increased dramatically to "price in" a steep online discount. Amazon has no advantage over BN or anyone else now. In the early days, Amazon did have a price advantage over retailers like BN. But recently, that advantage has disappeared because cover prices have increased so much that everyone offers a 25-40% discount. So that's not why BN got rid of their chairs and tables.
I call this huge cover price increase the "Dover effect" because the cheap textbook publisher Dover was slow to get with the program. They kept publishing cheap books long after other publishers capitulated and jacked up their cover prices. But a few years ago, Dover began dramatically increasing their cover prices. The thing is, the amount you pay for their books is about the same as it always was. They've almost doubled their cover prices to "price in" steep online discounts. All publishers have, but with Dover the effect was much more in your face because it seems like they started doing it overnight to catch up with publishing reality.
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