Touching the back wall of the Apple store

I remember the first time I tried to buy something at an Apple store. Usually avoid 'em cause I don't like Apple as a company, but I do like their laptops. I'd decided an M3 air was gonna be perfect as a general use laptop.

Walked into the store, waited 30 minutes for one of their "friendly, professional staff" to come up & help me, making eye contact, etc.

Eventually I had to walk up to one of them standing there and tell them I wanted to buy something. Then it turns out they didn't even have one in stock...in their flagship London store...

Literally I wanted to walk in, pay immediately & walk out. I already knew exactly what I wanted. I don't know why people laude the "Apple experience".

Their flagship shops (Especially London) are really not places you go to buy on a whim, it's why they have a booking and collection process - yes it might suck but its by far one of their busiest shops.

Well it was more the store was full of teenagers and kids generally fucking around while their parents browsed. Plenty of those parents were getting attended to by staff - even if they had bookings, it takes a spare staff member (of which there were many just milling around) one minute to ask me what I'm here for and recommend I make a booking if I had a complex request.

The conversation literally would have been "can I help you?" "Yes I want a space grey m3 macbook air, 16gb ram 512gb ssd, I will pay for it right now and then leave this terrible place tyvm". With the laptop on-hand the purchasing process would've taken as little time as it took for them to ram it into pos and for my phone nfc to pay.

I mean, it sounds like the XP was fine, they were just out of stock.. I assume they offered to order one for you, otherwise there's not much can be done about the logistics.

Ironically, enough, I've made the exact same purchase (well, not the color, but still an M3 MacBook Air) -- the Apple experience for me was literally "purchase from the online store in the evening, pick up from physical store next day during lunch break."

Out of interest how long ago was this? The Covent Garden and Oxford street ones literally have a queue line for pickups and purchases over in the far right. Not 100% sure how long Oxford street has had theirs (at least since Xmas) but I know for a fact it's existed at Covent Garden's since day one as I used to work there.

I'm trying to get better at replying to my internet friendos!

It was last year, 2024, in the year of our lord ChatGPT.

Oh, I certainly had a good look around in the 20-30 minutes I was waiting for attention. But I couldn't find anything like what you describe, nor staff to interact with me to at least get directed to the right place (which would take 10 seconds).

I mean I'm not saying it's a _bad_ shop. I'm just saying it's not always the angelic, golden, sterile, etc experience that many claim.