Apple shoppers are more than people, more than customers — they are seekers. Those Apple marketing guys said all along they were building not just stores but serene communities of true believers and new converts.
Um…this article goes on for four pages of “Oh, for the days when it was just you and me.” Here’s an example:
Not 18 months ago, cultural essayists and architecture critics would wander into flagship Apple Stores around the world (SoHo! Fifth Avenue! Regent Street!) and go long and poetic about Apple’s revolution in hipster elegance, the clean lines, the retail frontier. And indeed, these are beautiful places, pluralistic to the point that you can use their bathroom, and check your e-mail on their display Macs, and be among friends you always dreamed of having, somewhere. It was a glimpse at a world where everyone is smart, and agreeably diverse, and able to spend lots of money. Now you have to brace yourself to walk into the Apple Store. The question so recently was: What is the Apple Store doing to us, as a people?
Now the question is: What are we doing to it ?
Can you smother a store to death?
Smothering, yes. “It’s sweaty now,” a friend says, thinking about the Clarendon store.
It doesn’t scream elitist, does it?
I discovered something shocking in the article:
A woman glumly sits on a stool, waiting for genius help. It’s her MacBook, she sighs. It keeps crashing. You have to sign up for an appointment a day or two in advance now, or more. She’s been here twice with the same issue. She still loves Apple. She loves the machine. She loves the feeling. But she dreads coming here again.
What??? A Mac crashed? I didn’t think that happened!
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