Apple’s retail focus should be on customers, not cash | Macworld: “When I worked the sales floor, we were told to listen to our customers. To find out what they needed. To resist the urge to push a sale. If they needed five visits to decide to buy a computer, then visits one through four would be about answering every question they came up with, assuaging their fears, and—above all—making them feel at home. A manager of mine once told me, ‘The Apple Store is a place to ask questions and find out how a Mac fits into your life. The fact that we sell the computers is just gravy.’”
(Via. Serenity Caldwell, Macworld)
My experience at Apple Retail in the earlier days was similar to Miss Caldwell’s a few years later. There was already a growing sense of tension that the bean counters were getting us further and further away from our original mission, but by and large, the immediate supervisors—the store managers and assistant managers—always wanted us to focus on the customers. The sale was always secondary. That’s why no one was working on commission.
I keep thinking about that famous meeting where Steve Jobs berated members of the retail industry, telling them they had made buying a computer as crappy an experience as buying a used car. The Apple Stores changed all that. Sure, you want the Stores to make the company money, but in those early days, profitability wasn’t even a necessary goal. The Stores were going to do wonders for the brand, regardless of how much money they made.
The Apple Retail Chain is a product. Just like the iPad, or the iPhone, or the Mac, it needs to be designed to be the best possible product. Sure, you can make more margins on that product with careful tweaking of the parts, but you don’t start making iPads out of cheap plastic just to save a few bucks. That’s just not the Apple way.
Hopefully this kerfuffle will be a wakeup call to upper management.
