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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 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.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)