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Touching the back wall of the Apple store

(blog.lauramichet.com)
252 points nivethan | 1 comments | 27 Jun 25 02:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.216s | source
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JSR_FDED ◴[30 Jun 25 03:53 UTC] No.44419187[source]▶
I remember the first time I went into an Apple Store.

I was looking at a 17” PowerBook, salivating at the screen and performance but struggling with justifying the price tag. An incredibly nice lady walked up to me and asked if I had any questions. I told her I was thinking it over as it was a large purchase. She beamed and said “Of course, that’s totally understandable. In fact it takes on average 3 visits to an Apple Store before making a purchase”. It was the smartest, nicest, most low key way of saying don’t feel pressure…you’ll be coming back, and then you’ll buy the machine you’ve always wanted.

Very on brand. And surprisingly still not really copied by others.

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1. tpmoney ◴[30 Jun 25 17:40 UTC] No.44425955[source]▶
This was definitely the way Apple (used to) teach their employees. The 3 big “rules” were

1) No upsell pressure. We all got a flat hourly wage, so whether you bought the 5k computer or the 1k computer, we earned the same money. So focus on selling the customer the right computer for their needs.

2) It’s better to send the customer somewhere else or let them walk out the door than it is to sell them something that won’t work for them. Sort of a corollary to the first item, but the idea was more than anything, customers should feel like they could trust us. And if building that trust meant telling the customer “we do have USB cables, but the Belkin one we’re selling for $25 is no better for your printer than the generic brand Best Buy is selling across the street” then that’s what we did. A customer who trusts us is a customer that comes back, and a customer that comes back is a customer that buys more things. Sure they may not buy the USB cable today, but next month when they’re buying some other thing for their computer, they might just pick up some other cable or item that they might be able to get cheaper elsewhere, but they’re already here, we have it and they trust us to stock quality items.

3) Never ever make something up or guess. All the computers are fully functional and hooked up to the internet for a reason. If you don’t know the answer, tell that to the customer and take them over to a computer and look it up with them. You get a chance to demo the machine, you get a chance to let the customer try out the machine and most importantly you maintain that trust. The customer can feel confident you’re not bullshitting them, and they can feel confident in the answer you finally do reach because you looked it up together.

Apple’s opposition to being anything like CompUSA or other computer retailers at the time was IMO a huge factor in making their stores as big and popular as they were and are. Unfortunately my experience by the time I left was Apple’s rapid growth meant they were hiring more and more from outside the pool of “Apple enthusiasts ” and more and more from the wider retail world. It’s really hard to “untrain” the “high pressure commission sales” mindset from folks who have needed to live off that sort of sales approach. We’d also started to see some of it come down from above in the form of tracking individual “attachment metrics” like AppleCare. Back when AppleCare didn’t have accidental damage coverage, the pressure to sell AppleCare with the product in question rather than after the fact (at the time, up to 1 year after purchase) was antithetical to their otherwise strong focus on no upsells and building trust.