Identical tables and fixtures are built for each space. Even though both their construction time and useful life are short, temporary stores attempt to provide a familiar retail atmosphere. Yet, these makeshift spaces reveal Apple’s extraordinary attention to detail. The spaces are strictly meant to bridge the gap during a store redesign and aren’t celebrated. Temporary stores often pop up with little notice or fanfare. In locations without nearby alternatives or where construction work is estimated to be time-consuming, Apple has implemented temporary stores to ease the transition. As Apple’s stores have steadily grown in popularity over the past 17 years, renovations and expansions to keep up with increased traffic have necessitated temporary closures from time to time. Closures mean lost sales, disruptions to service, and a negative customer experience. Here's a fairly rough video of what went on.No retailer wants to close a store - even temporarily. I'll be working with the iPad throughout the day - stay tuned here on TUAW for more iPad information all weekend long. To get specific albums or songs onto the iPad you'll need to build playlists. You also have the option of automatically filling all free space. Checking or unchecking is done here on the playlist menu rather than song by song. Instead you are shown a screen that lets you either import all your songs, or just selected playlists, artists and genres that you choose from a listing showing your genius mixes, playlists, genres and a list of all the artists in your library. It pays no attention to songs that you've checked or unchecked. It's still syncing, but I did find something a bit odd with how it handles music from your iTunes library. In this case, who needs it? As everyone well knows, if you can run an iPhone or iPod touch, you can run one of these, and the system set up at the store to offer help to anyone who asked was a great idea. When I got it home, I found the box contained a USB cable, a 10 watt power supply and not a shred of instruction. The total time from entering the store to walking to my car was 28 minutes. Dawn was really excited about the device and we chatted for about five minutes about the potential of the iPad and how it was going to change everything. Not a problem, though, since managers were everywhere and one of them answered her questions immediately. She told me that the first time she had gotten her hands on an iPad was at about 8am, and she didn't know that it could handle IMAP mailboxes or how to set up more than one mail account. Although I didn't need it, I wanted to get the whole experience, and was led to a couch outside the store and paired up with Dawn who ran me through exactly the same set-up as on the iPhone. Next, I was asked if I wanted help setting up my email. Then he brought me to another guy, who plugged in the new iPad and activated it in about 30 seconds. I was met by an Apple Store employee named James, who walked me through the three-minute buying process. Promptly at 9am, people were let into the store in small groups and the store had the system down to a science. Most everyone else had vague answers about why they were there, ranging from, "it just seems really cool," to "I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but I need one." I talked to a few people while waiting to get in, and I met someone named Theo who had a real reason for buying an iPad: He's a DJ and wanted to use it to kick off videos while performing. At ten minutes to opening, a huge crowd of blue shirts ran up and down the mall screaming at the top of their lungs to pump up the crowd, but we didn't need pumping up. There was coffee and water to be had while waiting and a quick look inside the store showed so many Apple workers that I couldn't imagine how any customers would fit. For each 10 people with a reservation they would let in one person without, so perhaps they had something of a handle on inventory. There were already about 150 people waiting for their iPad, and the Apple Store folks had two lines set up: one for advance reservations and one for walk-ins.Īs a pre-order customer, I gave my name to a blue-shirted Apple person and was told to wait on the reservation line. I got to the Apple Store at Walt Whitman Mall at about 8:30 AM and the mall doors were open.
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