This is likely a firing as Apple Retail has been practically treading water since Angela came on board. She failed to address the major issues with Apple's retail offering including:
- Failure to be a growth engine for the company. Originally Apple stores helped to drive growth of Apple and introduce new customers as the stores were rolled out across the US and then worldwide. Apple retail should have been the spearhead for greater China dominance and a strong foothold in India. Both have not occurred.
- Cultural issues. Apple retail has changed from being a pleasant experience where staff were encouraged to help customers with issues (not matter what) to merely parroting a company line about why they cannot do anything with your issue because that's the company policy. Angela also kept trotting out the 'town square' community BS as well which rubs non-US citizens completely the wrong way; a US corporation trying to co-opt foreign public space for their sales offering.
- Lack of support integration. Apple has had a number of high profile support issues and failures including battery gate and the MacBook keyboard issues. Instead of becoming a proactive support channel to help customers with these issues, Apple Retail worked as the company's PR firewall... exacerbating a bad situation for customers who experienced these problems. Support times at Apple Stores have increased and the experience has worsened.
- No innovation. Apple retail hasn't significantly changed or improved since Angela came on-board. 'Today at Apple' is a re-brand of the many sessions that Apple Stores have always had. The interior design changes and architectural changes are more Jony's doing than Angela's. In 5 years most of the change has been superficial with the core changes that have evolved actually degrading customers experience.
Glad to see the exec change. Took 5 years and should have happened earlier, but better late than never.
I'm not sure where your perceptions come from (such as if you've ever worked at an Apple Retail store) so I'm going to give you my perspective and only on a couple of your points because I can't speak to all of them.
I worked in Apple Retail under Ron Johnson and John Browett.
From what I recall, the original intent of these stores was to have them be "gathering places" for people -- similar to a town square. This concept's as old as the first of the stores.
During the ten months John Browett was in charge, the store I worked at saw significant attrition due to cut hours, an increased emphasis on offering more support than we had the resources for, and a very obvious push to attach multiple accessories onto each sale.
Those "Today at Apple" rebranding you're talking about? They were essentially gutted to quick, useless Q&A sessions when Browett worked there.
I really don't think Angela was a problem. If anything her hire was a breath of fresh air for them.
Whatever the original intentions, I can say honestly that an Apple Store in its current form is never a "gathering place" or a "town square".
The experience from beginning to end is always - line up at the front, talk to an Apple employee, depending on whether you have an appointment or not, get shepparded to a lineup (whether at the genius bar, the teach and learn table, or the repair pickup table, etc) and wait in line until your turn.
If you are just browsing / window shopping, the experience is jam yourself into a packed tiny space packed with human smells of sweat and farts, get a stern looking up and down by the security people, and try to get a computer/phone/idevice to look at. If you take too long, other people will either try to edge you out, or eventually you get an apple employee asking whether you want to buy it or if they can show you anything.
This is NOT a gathering place/town square. Of course. Being a commercially oriented sales space it can't be because that violates the purpose of the space. I'm not saying that you can't build a space like this, but the way Apple has structured the retail stores makes it extremely sales oriented.
Taking the Starbucks example quoted below. When you go to starbucks, get a latte, and sit down to browse your computer, you don't have Starbucks employees coming to you asking if you want a pumpkin spice latte or if you want some training on how to be a coffee barista in your own home too. You just want to take a seat and do whatever - none of the business of the store employees. It's just a place to sit. Of course, you should / need to buy something to sit there, but once you are there, you usually are left alone to do whatever, meet friends, have a date, etc. That's a good "gathering space" concept.
Your recounting of your experience is really far from mine. My local Apple Store (WTC in NYC) is very accessible and friendly. If anything, I find it mildly annoying to have to chit-chat with staff when I know what I want. With an appointment, support wait times are minimal and so far always helpful and friendly. I walk my dogs through the store sometimes, and even they love it!
My experiences at the Portland, Oregon Pioneer Place store are similar to GP. Come in the door, talk to an employee (sometimes there is a line, sometimes not), get shepherded over to another line and wait for a lot longer to see another employee, and then either wait a long time to get what you came for, if it's that easy, or they sit you down somewhere to wait until someone can really deal with you.
I don't go unless I have at least an hour of spare time and whatever I need can only reasonably be accomplished at the Apple Store. The place is a zoo, even if you're just browsing it's elbow to elbow.
The employees are nice, but I am aghast every time I go at how poor of an experience it is compared to what I think Apple should be capable of. Luckily when they do finally get to me, I've always had the issue solved (usually a new device) but up until that final encounter I just feel like a number. The fact that I have to stand on a concrete floor the entire time makes me double grumpy because my old-man feet do not like it one bit.
Similar experience in Perth, Australia. Apple is vastly more popular in 2019 than they were in 2009, so the magical Apple experience of seeing someone immediately & getting a while-you-wait repair is gone [1]. Even the appointment system is just choosing a time when you're allowed to come into the store to wait for half an hour until someone is available. They really need more stores & more staff, but that would eat into Apple's profits.
The one difference I've had is that I'm not even getting my issues resolved anymore. (Full sob story is in my comment history.) I'm typing this on a Thinkpad X1 and gave up on Apple after 15 years.
[1] Does anyone else remember when Apple would give you a coffee voucher for a local cafe while you were waiting, and send you a txt message to come back to the store once your MacBook Pro was fixed or replaced? They used to be magical, and they could afford to do all that because the machines were built for life & repairs were rare. That's all gone now.
There are now 900M iPhone users and 100M Mac users and 200M iPad users, while some may be overlap, there is give or take 1 Billion users Apple potentially serve. And yet they still only have 500 Stores, with more than half of them in US. So in terms of users and Store distribution US has a much better Ratio, and hence the favourable experience in the two previous reply, coming from US.
A long time ago ( I think it was 2015 ) I had expected Apple to reach 1000 Apple Store Worldwide by 2020. But just like every part of their infrastructure, ( CDN, Datacentre, Solar Energy, Recycling etc ) their "Asset-Light" strategy, being extremely conservative with any Asset has hold them back.
There are no seats in the stores near me. (or you have stools at specific benches that you need to give up when the apple employee tells you to). No place to have some small table space for yourself temporarily, if you have a jacket (often times wet from coming in from outside in the rain or snow, etc), there's no place to hang it. No use of washrooms. If you have a whole family of 4-5 who want to come by to learn how to use a computer, can you accommodate that? Or do you need to "book" the lesson table, make an appt with the genius bar etc. Is it only accessible for single people or couples with money?
Just those questions alone - think about what a gathering place is supposed to be! I think people are getting way too hoodwinked by marketing speak and are forgetting how an actual gathering space might function.
As a sales space, it's designed brilliantly. People come in, they see stuff they like, they want to buy it, pay money, sale done, time to go. That is perfected by the Apple store environment, but it is very much NOT a gathering space
I've always thought the sales experience was kinda crappy. I look around, decide I want to buy something, and then I hunt down an employee. Usually they're chatting with someone else so I wait until I can get their attention. Then, as long as it's just an accessory, I can buy it from them and leave. But if it's an iPhone, there's a whole process. I once managed to talk my way out of the store with a shrinkwrapped phone by insisting I actually was totally competent to set it up myself, but I almost had to beg.
I would find it a lot easier if they segregated the sales associates into two distinct group. One spot if all you want to do is buy and run, and another if you want the interactive experience. Then again, I'm a self-checkout kinda guy and I'd be even happier with some version of that.
In the UK, at least, you can serve yourself with the app - pick up your item, scan the barcode, pay with Apple Pay, and you're done. Might have to show the on-phone receipt to the door people too but I've only been asked once. Maybe this is why the Quick Checkout counter has gone?
Your idea of a town square is very foreign to me. I guess it’s a cultural divide, but I don’t think of a town square as a place to hang jackets and go to the toilet! More like killing time or people-watching while waiting to meet someone. You’re describing something like the highway rest areas I’ve visited in Japan.
Usually town squares also have facilities or hookups for preparing meals (whether indoors like a prep kitchen or outdoors like a fixed bbq pit or a stone pizza oven, or at least electrical and water hookups for portable setups). An outdoors town square might have a gazebo, or a tent covered area for gathering, space to keep jackets, a place to relieve yourself during your activity (ie if it's outdoors, portapotties, or outhouse/out-building or if indoors publicly accessible washrooms)
A place where community can gather for the purpose of talking/communing with one another, in a town square fashion. Protection from elements during the activity, etc.
My posts above were pertaining to indoors gathering spaces (hence the seats, hanging coats, etc) but either way, Apple stores do NOT resemble outdoors towns squares at all as well.
What OP describes is pretty common in the PNW, town squares or neighborhood squares will have a number of different seating areas, restrooms, hookups so you can have a food vendor or three without stringing electric cabling and water pipes everywhere, etc.
In SoCal, some towns like Oceanside have a very vibrant street fair that is very enjoyable.
FWIW, I grew up with such things in rural New England and the park an eighth of a mile of a subway stop here in Boston provides a similar value. I don't think this is just a European phenomenon--more of one where there is currently, or was recently, a sense of real community.
The town square “gathering places” notion isn’t a bad concept to have for a retail operation to adopt for their internal vision.
It’s fine and really just a rip-off of Starbuck’s “third place” (which was around long before Apple used it for their retail vision).
While Apple Retail was headed by Angela however she was involved in preposterous keynote speeches about how it’s making cities better and supporting the community. It was corporate BS writ large and used as a justification for pushing large retail stores into state significant public spaces.
It’s not a town square when it’s owned and controlled by a corporation who decides what does and doesn’t occur within its boundaries.
Is it? The problem is scaling at the stores, both in support and sales, and that they can't really keep up.
There are some fairly obvious ways to tackle both of those issues that have been ignored - god forbid Apple lowered themselves to have an actual sales counter that could churn through customers who know what they want rapidly. Triage and management of support cases seems to need desperate reform (it's still great that Apple gave me a whole new Macbook last week. It's bad that it took two weeks with a dead machine before they could see me and that product reliability is going downhill so fast that this is the third time that Macbook has fried itself in two years).
I still find that appointment almost hilarious. Dixons who he used to oversee in the UK had an appalling reputation for terrible support and very aggressive sales reps trying to sell useless accessories and extended warranties. I wonder if any Apple exec ever visited one of his old stores?
The first 5-10 years of Apple Retail were like the movie Empire Records... help the customer and have a fucking blast doing it. Rules? Not really. I worked there for almost 2 years and had a lot of fun solving unique consumer tech problems one on one with the customers. It was a very personal experience, customers knew our names, came back sometimes just to chat or bring us baked goods... maybe we’d go have a few beers on lunch break, smoke a little weed. Now when I walk into an Apple Store it feels like Best Buy.
Strategy for whom? Not anyone in charge of Apple Retail, surely... sounds more like a policy question for government and society that undoes the foundation of our markets and most of capitalism.
Nothing about a capitalist market necessitates what the GP described. It is a question of ethics; you could instead treat it as a governmental policy question, but if you need law to codify ethics you've already gone off the road and you're just waiting to hit the ground.
Which we have.
"A question for society"? Apple's part of society, man.
How many Italian restaurants where you live have expanded into making and selling their own pasta and sauce at retail? If we're talking about the foundation of most of capitalism, surely it would be exhibited there more often than "never."
FWIW I was an Apple store employee (specialist) and your assessment resonates very well with me.
I think the reason for the poor experience comes down to scale. Apple is too big now. There are just too many people. I remember when you used to be able to walk into the Genius Bar totally unannounced and you could usually get help in just a few minutes. Now you need to schedule your appointments a week in advance and you’ll only get an obscure 10:40am time slot.
Apple retail was an experience when the customer base was smaller but the iPhone completely changed that. I don’t think retail can scale that big and offer the same experience. If anything stores need to be more plentiful and smaller.
you’ve not substantiated any of those criticisms, and frankly they’re so general in nature that they’d apply to practically any executive departure to some degree, so they lack insight.
what she did was increase sales per square foot by over 20% [0], expanded the retail footprint globally, and made the store experience more coherent/consistent. not too shabby but also not what she was hired to do.
her problem was that she was tasked with the very difficult goal of turning apple retail into a luxury experience akin to burberry and turn apple watch into a must-have fashion accessory. she was to lay the groundwork for apple’s thrust into wearables, but she had very little control over the product (ascetic watch bands and ear tampons... i kid, i love my airpods) and no control over strategy or logistics. unlike burberry, where change cycles with the seasons, apple cycles over many years. you just don’t have enough control and urgency to make the changes apple wanted. honestly, i don’t think anyone could have accomplished that goal.
> her problem was that she was tasked with the very difficult goal of turning apple retail into a luxury experience akin to burberry and turn apple watch into a must-have fashion accessory. she was to lay the groundwork for apple’s thrust into wearables, but she had very little control over the product
And how, exactly, do you know that was what she waas tasked with? That sounds a lot like expectations that an outsider might have placed on her based on a quick glance at her bio, but you have no idea what her tactical and strategic objectives were.
Biggest issue I’ve seen was the change of sending retail employees out for training at the mothership to doing it at the stores. That’s a huge cultural shift and a horrible horrible horrible idea.
10 years ago when I first bought a Macintosh, the apple Store was a warm and inviting place. I could ask questions at the Genius Bar, I could talk to people who showed at least somewhat of an interest in me as a customer. Now it just seems very sterile and vacant, big open spaces but not very inviting.
I'm 100% with you on this. My experience at Apple stores is where the veneer of "Apple" disappears. It's a mess. Hurded into likes. Having to wait 10-15-20 mins just to buy something I need zero help for. Watching how their sales systems, repair systems and apple.com are not remotely integrated so everything has to be entered in triplicate. Objectively bad support but with the name "Apple" applied everyone seems to give it pass.
> Watching how their sales systems, repair systems and apple.com are not remotely integrated so everything has to be entered in triplicate
That is entirely the opposite of any experience I've had in an Apple store - they seem to have all the info they need (including my email address and card on file) at their fingertips - no re-entry or messing around.
> Apple Retail has been practically treading water since Angela came on board
It is my understanding that Apple stores have higher revenue per square foot than any other store in the entire history of retail, which is difficult to reconcile with your statement.
Same day is still rare, I'd argue. Walmart started online sales in 2000. Newegg came to be in 2001. Zappos existed since 1999. Amazon 1-click was also patented in 1999. Yes, you didn't have Shopify spawning an uncountable number of small stores, you didn't have Amazon Fresh or Instacart.
> No innovation. Apple retail hasn't significantly changed or improved since Angela came on-board. 'Today at Apple' is a re-brand of the many sessions that Apple Stores have always had. The interior design changes and architectural changes are more Jony's doing than Angela's. In 5 years most of the change has been superficial with the core changes that have evolved actually degrading customers experience.
The first sentence is correct, as I see it, but I think it's a general Apple problem and not something the stores have much to do with. If you've been given subpar products over the last several years to sell, you're still selling subpar products no matter how you dress it up. The public knows Apple hardware isn't nearly as reliable as it used to be and suffer from a wide range of problems across all of their product lines, well the major product lines. After continuing for several years, it's catching up. There isn't anything the stores can do. It's up to corporate to mandate better quality control and build quality. What they've been providing is not acceptable for many. They're losing the most die hard apple fans. Even they get tired of having to waste so much time and money and Apple is becoming harder for them to defend. You can forgive for a year, or a few years maybe, but after that it appears to be a systemic problem that no one at the top is taking serious enough. The brand is tarnished. Go back to basics.
> Apple has had a number of high profile support issues and failures including battery gate and the MacBook keyboard issues. Instead of becoming a proactive support channel to help customers with these issues, Apple Retail worked as the company's PR firewall... exacerbating a bad situation for customers who experienced these problems. Support times at Apple Stores have increased and the experience has worsened.
That is also top-down. If Apple (corporate) fights hard against people and claims there are no issues with their hardware and won't cover things like the spotlight problem new displays are having (a design flaw), or keyboards that don't work if they get dust in them (a design flaw), or the phone bends in a pocket under normal use (a design flaw), until the news gets so bad and class action lawsuits have to get filed to provide extended warranties, then I'm not sure what the store can actually do about it except put lipstick on a pig, offer an apology, and commiserate with the customers frustration.
My mother is a professional photographer. She has always been a die hard apple fan, because they made solid computers and a seamless OS. She has multiple iPads, an iPhone, iMac, Macbook Air and Macbook Pro. She does a lot of traveling. For over 10 years, she had 0 issues, except for normal wear and tear items. The last 3 years, she has been to the Apple store over 15 times, with multiple issues and hardware failures. Weeks without hardware as it had to be sent in to be repaired. Her whole life has been tied up in Apple and she loved them. Absolutely loved them. It all used to just work. They were reliable. She called me last weekend to ask what I thought about the Surface Pros and if I'd go look at some with her. I was shocked. She was steaming, she has had enough. Apple has lost her as a customer for life. There is no way she will ever try them again, no matter what they do.
They can do whatever they want with the Apple store. It won't do anything. The problem is the products they are selling don't work as well as they used to, for many people. People who buy Apple are buying into the premise it will "just work" and is "quality, premium hardware." That is the reputation their brand is built on, and what they are no longer living up to.
- Failure to be a growth engine for the company. Originally Apple stores helped to drive growth of Apple and introduce new customers as the stores were rolled out across the US and then worldwide. Apple retail should have been the spearhead for greater China dominance and a strong foothold in India. Both have not occurred.
- Cultural issues. Apple retail has changed from being a pleasant experience where staff were encouraged to help customers with issues (not matter what) to merely parroting a company line about why they cannot do anything with your issue because that's the company policy. Angela also kept trotting out the 'town square' community BS as well which rubs non-US citizens completely the wrong way; a US corporation trying to co-opt foreign public space for their sales offering.
- Lack of support integration. Apple has had a number of high profile support issues and failures including battery gate and the MacBook keyboard issues. Instead of becoming a proactive support channel to help customers with these issues, Apple Retail worked as the company's PR firewall... exacerbating a bad situation for customers who experienced these problems. Support times at Apple Stores have increased and the experience has worsened.
- No innovation. Apple retail hasn't significantly changed or improved since Angela came on-board. 'Today at Apple' is a re-brand of the many sessions that Apple Stores have always had. The interior design changes and architectural changes are more Jony's doing than Angela's. In 5 years most of the change has been superficial with the core changes that have evolved actually degrading customers experience.
Glad to see the exec change. Took 5 years and should have happened earlier, but better late than never.