When I got to the end of John Gruber’s 2018 Apple Report Card, I liked that he added his evaluation of the state of Apple’s Retail, and I agree that Retail should be one of the categories of Jason Snell’s report card. Gruber writes:
I’ve disliked the experience of buying stuff at the Apple Store ever since they did away with queues for checking out. I just want to get in line, wait my turn, pay, and leave. Instead, the way to check out at an Apple Store is to wander around until you get the attention of an employee who has one of the handheld checkout iPod Touches. This can be maddening. My wife refuses to shop at an Apple Store for this reason. I know you can use the Apple Store app to check yourself out, but I don’t like it. Part of the reason Apple’s stores are too crowded is that people are wandering around trying to pay for things.
And getting technical support at Apple Stores is terrible now. In the old days you could just walk in with a broken or otherwise problematic device and get an appointment at the Genius Bar within the hour. Now, the Genius Bar is booked for days in advance — sometimes close to a week. In some ways that’s inevitable — Apple is way more popular now than it was pre-iPhone. But inevitable or not, the result is that getting support at an Apple Store now stinks. And frankly, the technical acumen of the Genius Bar staffers is now hit-or-miss.
I rarely visit my local Apple Store. Friends of mine have been to “Today at Apple” events and they told me they had a nice time. I wanted to see for myself, but I’ve always had scheduling conflicts, or I didn’t book my slot in time. If I just want to pay the store a visit to look around, it’s a frustrating experience because the place is usually crowded and I don’t want to fight with stubborn 12-year-olds to have a chance to put my hands on a new iPad Pro.
Thankfully all my Apple hardware has been reliable, so I can’t say anything about the Genius Bar service of my Apple Store, but the anecdotes I’ve heard paint a similar scenario as the one Gruber describes.
But the one time I needed actual information, and acted on the information I was given, it was a disaster; for the simple reason that the Apple Store clerk who ‘took care’ of me gave me incorrect information. This happened in June 2018 when I was trying to purchase an iMac. I simply asked if it was possible to do a partial financing at the time of purchase. For example, suppose you want to buy a €1,500 Mac and you want to pay €1,000 up-front and the rest in a few instalments. The clerk told me this was “totally possible”. Even online, without coming to the store? “Sure! You can, for instance, buy a €1,000 gift card, go to the store, go through the payment process, do a partial payment by typing the gift card code, then choose the financing option when the system asks you how you want to pay the rest of the amount.” This sounded logical to me, so I did as instructed.
Except, after typing the gift card code, the only option was (if I remember correctly) to pay the remaining amount by using a credit or debit card. Since this was late in the evening, the following morning we phoned Apple Support and, after waiting a while, we talked to someone who told us that no, partial financing was not possible. “Who gave you such information?” they asked. “One of your guys,” we replied bitterly.
Now, normally gift cards aren’t refundable. I was too angry and frustrated for this, so I let my wife handle the situation. She later told me that, once at the Store, she explained the issue to a manager. The manager asked her who gave us the incorrect information, and luckily that clerk was present, so my wife was able to literally point at him. The manager kindly refunded us the €1,000 of the gift card, and that was that.
That was an annoying setback for me, however, because at the time my old MacBook Pro was behaving in such erratic and unreliable ways that I truly feared I couldn’t complete the work assignments for which I would earn the remaining money I needed to buy the iMac. Fortunately the MacBook Pro didn’t leave me stranded, and I could purchase the iMac the following month.
But that clerk’s incompetence had cost me time and unnecessary grief. And in case you’re wondering why I didn’t cross-check the information he gave me before proceeding, well, it’s because I trusted the guy. And I trusted that a company such as Apple would prepare their retail employees enough to provide what I consider basic information. This is what ‘taking care of the customer’ ultimately means, not just being superficially kind and welcoming and displaying a confident attitude. Design is how it works, not just how it looks, even in retail.