From Logan Moore’s “Target Is More Than Doubling Apple Shops Within Its Stores in Time for the Holidays” posted Tuesday by Barron’s:
Target (TGT) said Tuesday that it will more than double the number of Apple (AAPL) shop-in-shops in its stores to 36 from 17, just in time for holiday shopping as consumer demand ramps up.
Target’s tech consultants will be trained by Apple, and iPhones and other devices will be available.
The new in-store Apple shops will be in Orlando, Miami, and nine stores in Texas.
My take: “Trained by Apple” makes a big difference. But then again, Apple training ain’t what it used to be, especially around the holidays.
In the future, these workers may work for Apple, mobile carriers, corporate IT, or IT services providers like IBM and Cisco, or just become the Apple expert among family and friends. In all cases, they help increase switchers from PCs and Android.
And of course, nearly no one switches back to the inferior products.
If a quarter of Target’s are upgraded to “Store within a store” Apple fronts, the number of Apple retail outlets in the US just increased by about 500.
But where will they go? My first thought is locales too small to support an Apple Store. My second thought is as a secondary outlet in more densely populated areas not yet ready for a second Apple Store.
As an example would be Coeur d’Alene ID and Spokane WA. Separated by 30 miles of I-90, Coeur d’Alene isn’t near big enough to support an Apple Store, but the Target store does very well. To offset its diminutive market size Coeur d’Alene is one of the nations wealthiest communities and has 3 colleges/universities within its city limits. During the summer months it’s population swells by 2X.
These Apple shops-in-shops (or stores-in-shops) never will fulfill the lively experience of shopping in an Apple store, but they do give consumers access to Apple’s products and opportunities for technical assistance and advice. More important, as brother Fred S denoted, these Apple shops-in-shops give consumers who are owners of Android devices and PCs opportunities to become familiar and knowledgeable about Apple products leading to the possibility of their becoming owners of Apple devices.
In summary, I agree with brother Fred S. It is important that the trained Apple advisors stationed at these “shop-in-shops” are better trained, hopefully at the Senior Advisor levels. It will have longer term value for Apple and for Apple investors.
Yeah, but when the solution is not obvious, Apple devices are notoriously opaque in providing debugging information. I’m particularly annoyed when I see an error number with no way to look up what that number means. Of course, we’d like to not have problems in the first place, but making it easier to diagnose problems without spending time with Tier 1 Support to get to Tier 2 Support would be a big help. I’ll call Apple for help maybe once every other year, but when I do, it usually takes Tier 2 and often several sessions to figure out what’s going on and how to fix it. But I do want to give Apple full credit, the Tier 2 people have been great and are clearly dedicated to fixing the problem, and not just getting me off the phone!