
We are giving out water - davidw
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/06/iphone4
======
dkarl
Apple loves this stuff. I was in an Apple store a few weeks ago to buy a gift.
Aside from the "Genius" Bar, there were five employees helping customers and
another two employees fiddling with boxes and displays. There were seven or
eight customers ahead of me impatiently waiting to be served. There was a lot
of ostentatious yawning, foot-tapping, and watch-checking. In the ten minutes
I stayed, the employees on the floor managed to serve and check out _four_
customers. Seven employees, ten minutes, four transactions. That isn't
incompetence. That's policy. They're inflating perceptions of their popularity
and their importance. If someone can see you without waiting, you aren't
important. If you hurry for someone, that makes them more important than you,
so don't do it.

My question is, is this _ever_ a good idea? People put up with it because they
have to, but what happens when they don't? (I walked out of the store, but I
bought the damn iPad online anyway, because it's a Father's Day gift, and I
can't tell my mom and sister we're not getting it just because Apple ticks me
off. They've never heard of Android, plus my dad is a perpetual noob who needs
the most mainstream device available.)

Would people buy _less_ if they were well-treated? That seems to be the
premise. Or maybe not -- maybe the abuse is not intended to maximize sales,
but rather to intensify loyalty among hard-core fans. That might make sense:
banking loyalty and prestige to prepare for a contingency when they have to
move clearly inferior products.

~~~
starkfist
That isn't policy. It's in-and-out at any of the NYC stores, and the one in
Rosedale, Minnesota.

~~~
dkarl
I don't exactly have high efficiency standards for retail employees at the
mall. What I saw was shocking even by those standards. What was most offensive
was that not a single employee in the store, and I mean not a single one, was
sensitive to the impatience of the customers. Looking at the body language of
the people around me, I think the mood varied from "grumpy" to "murderous,"
but the employees were calm, happy, and unhurried. Just from a psychological
point of view, that seemed unnatural and offensive. Or sociopathic. When
someone who's been waiting forever, during lunchtime (hence probably on their
lunch hour,) marches determinedly up to a sales guy and tells him precisely
what he want to buy, and the sales guy, instead of immediately getting the guy
what he wants, starts demoing the product for him, and the guy says, "Uh huh,
uh huh, yeah, I've got one already," in a pissed-off tone of voice, at that
point the sales guy should, you know, give up and just sell the guy what he
wants. To keep stalling and trying to make chit-chat, maybe start demoing a
slightly different product, and to do all this calmly and slowly and
beatifically, is offensive. Or sociopathic. Take your pick. A whole store full
of guys acting like that, I don't know. I just don't know. Maybe it's the
culture of the individual store, but I can't imagine it happening anywhere
other than an Apple store.

~~~
starkfist
Do you happen to smell extremely bad? Maybe it's you?

------
jolie
Is it really, _really_ so bad to wait a couple days or weeks longer to get
your precious fucking iPhone?

I hate queuing in general, but this is the kind of line-waiting that literally
makes no sense at all to me.

~~~
ErrantX
> but this is the kind of line-waiting that literally makes no sense at all to
> me

This is a cultural thing :) put a couple of us brits together and we will form
a queue. And we will do it with minimal fuss and lots of solidarity.

We are damned good at it - and very proud of that.

(my "best queue" was 8 hours for a Leeds Festival ticket :))

~~~
jolie
Oh, I totally get lining up for an event. It's a one-time thing, and you
literally HAVE to line up to get a ticket/get in.

But a phone? It'll last a year or so, depending. And it's not necessary to
queue.

If I could sum up my thoughts in one word, that word would be "GAH."

~~~
ErrantX
Pish. Who cares what it's for, you can't beat the beauty of a good queue. :-p

------
stevenbedrick
Well, personally, I agree with the article's interpretation of events... but:
does anybody else see the irony inherent to The Economist, of all
publications, complaining about something like this?

I mean, this is the free market at work, right? Nobody's forcing these people
to queue for hours. Both Apple and its customers are making choices based on
costs and benefits. Apple, on the one hand, apparently sees financial benefit
to treating a certain segment of its customer base like crap. Those same
customers have apparently decided that being treated shabbily is worth getting
the new shiny a little bit sooner than their friends.

If that ain't capitalism, I don't know what is. Seems like it'd be right up
The Economist's alley...

~~~
amirmc
It's not quite about capitalism though. Had the people known they would end up
in a 6+hr queue they may have decided not to bother.

The fact that they had reservations means they were probably expecting a
different experience.

------
eplanit
The picture couples well with the revealing self-description in the first
sentence: 'like a dutiful customer'. As a _customer_, you have no _duty_ to
the vendor. Oh, wait, it's Apple we're talking about. Never mind. :-)

------
colah
Also, by forcing people to invest time like this, they build customer loyalty.
The customers don't want to admit that they were wrong.

On the other hand, this could backfire if someone gets fed up. It only builds
loyalty if the customers tolerate this abuse -- because then they need to
explain to themselves why they did.

------
kevinelliott
I think it would be a difficult task to organize reserved units by time, as
the author is implying. What would Apple do? Give you a specific time block of
when to be there? Would it be ok to be late by 1 minute due to traffic? Would
20 people be in a particular time block, giving a little buffer. What happens
with everyone is a minute late? It takes time to activate these things too, so
what about delays in previous customer's transactions that push your
appointments back? Ever been to your doctor after six peep ahead of you were
late or their appointments ran long?

It's just not sustainable to schedule hundreds of thousands of people into
time slots in a given day. Perhaps they could schedule you into thirds of the
day, but then people will bitch and moan about that. They could schedule
people for specific days, but then you know people will complain about that.

The reality is, most people who want it on launch day, want it on launch day,
and as early as possible. They want to wait in a fair FIFO queue, however long
it takes to get through it. This is evidenced by multiple years of multiple
products delivered by Apple. A few people will complain about everything. If
the guy wants one so bad, he can buy one on eBay, or better coordinate his
travel arrangements ahead of time, right?

In all sincerity and open-mindedness, how is this Apple's problem when the
world wants to buy their product all at once (even if they do emit mind
control to cause it)?

------
ek
This reminds me of a scene several years ago during the PS3 release. At the
Metreon in San Francisco, outside the PlayStation Store that has since closed,
Sony was handing out not only bottled water but hamburger meals, real
hamburger meals, not fast food, to people waiting to purchase PS3s. I wasn't
in that line, but I happened to be walking by the Metreon on the way to my
destination, which I don't quite recollect. Pretty incredible to juxtapose
that with an event like this.

------
subwindow
Restaurants and clubs do this all the time. It's not so surprising or
ingenious. It is kind of a bitch, though.

~~~
treyp
isn't that due to actual full capacity (restaurants) and fire code (clubs)? i
don't think either one has the ability to schedule their customers throughout
the day or take another approach to reservations.

~~~
subwindow
Clubs will keep a line out the door by instructing the bouncer to slowly let
people in or to randomly decide to not let anyone in at a given time (when the
line is not long enough).

Restaurants will do this by having the waiting area artificially small.
Restaurants where you order before you sit down will have the cash registers
near the door, and understaff the registers.

------
BRadmin
I reserved one at the store in hopes of being able to get it earlier and more
reliably than those having it shipped.

The extra inconvenience must be worth something, right?

Nope, most people who got them shipped received them in the comfort of their
home / office a day early.

------
Flemlord
Why does Apple get blamed for this? It's the AT&T signup process that takes
all the time. I queued for 2 hours for the first iPhone but I walked right
into the store for my iPad. The only difference was the lack of AT&T in the
process.

------
cwilson
I'm really confused as to why people are not getting this.

Pre-Order: You paid for a phone. You had the option to have it shipped to your
door (most people did this obviously). You could go pick it up if you want but
why would you do that, anyone who has paid attention to Apple releases for the
past 4 years knows the lines are insanely long. Thus the shipping option.

Reservation: You haven't paid Apple a DIME. You simply reserved a phone. You
get to show up and wait for a phone on a first come, first serve basis, but
you are guaranteed to get one if you do. You know what you're getting yourself
into. The long lines were a result of each activation taking anywhere from 5 -
15 minutes because of the micro-sim change.

Walk-Ups: You didn't pre-order and you didn't get a reservation in time. You
decided to camp over night for a phone. You obviously knew exactly what you
were getting yourself into.

As for the waiting in line experience itself: Apple extended store hours into
the wee hours to fill all reserved phones. Apple paid for free drinks and free
food to be handed out the entire time. I could have eaten a dozen chicken
sandwiches if I had wanted them. I met a bunch of cool people while waiting,
it wasn't a bad experience in any way other then the actual waiting... which I
knew was the case when I got in my car to head to the Apple store.

Apple didn't force anyone to wait in a line. This is absolutely absurd.

------
Tichy
Hm, if I was an iPhone developer I would try to create an app for that.
Organizing the queuing, I mean. Could we come up with some self organizing
numbering scheme (assuming the shop doesn't collaborate, and everybody in the
queue already has an iPhone (pre-4), which seems reasonable)? A problem could
be that people would forget to check in once they had their turn at the
counter, so maybe it would have to be some kind of dead man's button ("yes, I
am still queueing").

~~~
eru
How about selling your reservation?

------
phreanix
People who reserved this item know from previous experience they were most
likely going to wait in line for it.

They _knew_.

I'm not saying that Apple couldn't have handled this differently, but there is
a _value_ that was attached to this item by the people in line. The cost of
time lost/waiting in line for hours was something factored in to the value
they were expecting for their iphone.

Some of the more pragmatic and practical types scoff and write articles about
how much all horrible lines are going to affect Apple's reputation (and bottom
line), yet history has and will prove them wrong. Did the horrible lines for
the iPhone 2G affect the sales of the 3G? The 3Gs, the iPad? It did,
_positively._

~~~
pyre

      > People who reserved this item know from previous
      > experience they were most likely going to wait in
      > line for it.
    

I haven't followed previous launches, but were customers reserving their
iPhones during this launches too? It seems really odd to me that as the author
stated, Apple knew the number of people that had reserved their phone in
advance. They can't claim that they "didn't know" how many people would turn
up on launch day. They could easily have tried to design a way to better
facilitate people getting their phones, or at the _bare minimum_ tell people
beforehand that they are expecting there to be long lines.

    
    
      > Did the horrible lines for the iPhone 2G affect
      > the sales of the 3G? The 3Gs, the iPad? It did,
      > positively.
    

The article states that all of the press that Apple gets from this is good for
them, but bad for their customers. So I don't see how you are contradicting
the article here.

------
jrockway
Yeah. This is why I don't buy anything that I can't get from Amazon.

Step 1: find product Step 2: click "2-day one click" Step 3: the product
arrives at my house

~~~
ghshephard
Ironically, apple is actually one of the few companies out there that has
licensed one click purchasing from Amazon. (everyone waiting in line, btw,
could have chosen to just have their phone shipped to them)

~~~
pyre

      > (everyone waiting in line, btw, could have chosen
      > to just have their phone shipped to them)
    

True, but I think most of those people felt that they would just be able to
walk in and pick it up since they had a reservation. Handing out reservations
implies that Apple has set one aside, just for you. You just have to walk in
and get it.

------
URSpider94
I pre-ordered mine for shipment from the local AT&T store (would have done it
online, but the web site was unusable on pre-order day). It was waiting for me
when I got home last night, all I had to do was charge it, activate it and
sync it.

This time, it was just luck that I decided not to ask for an in-store
appointment. But, next time I'll be sure to take the free shipping FTW.

------
Mc_Big_G
I just had an epiphany. Here's what I'm going to do when I need to make a
critical decision about how to operate my business. First, I'll spend days
doing market research to develop a keen sense of what would be the right and
fair thing to do to make my customers happy. Then I'll throw that out and do
whatever I think Apple would do.

~~~
nijikunai
It doesn't really work for everyone.

------
ghshephard
Folks - waiting in line in front of an apple store is part of the experience
(I am standing 3 hours back right now in palo alto.). Half of the fun is
launch day socializing, enjoying the spectacle, etc...

Seriously, if I didn't want to wait in line, I would have just had them ship
me my iPhone. Zero wait.

------
alexyim
There's also something to be said about how the more effort you spend
attaining something, the more valuable it becomes (e.g. the psychology behind
hazing in fraternities).

So Apple gets free marketing AND increased loyalty. Hurray.

------
anamax
I understand that the iPhone is also available at some AT&T stores.

Do they have lines? Or is buying at the Apple store part of the experience?

------
diego_moita
I am surprised that nobody sees here a recipe for downfall : Apple is a very
incompetent company when it comes to product massification. This is the most
anti-Henry Ford strategy possible: overpriced premium products for a cult-like
base of customers. They sell gadgets like Louis-Vuitton sells handbags and
Prada sells shoes. And that's exactly the strategy they followed with the Mac
and got them cornered in a niche. I wonder how long will it take until Dell,
Asus or EeePc eats their lunch with a cheap Android.

~~~
madh
You forgot about coupling their premium products to some best-in-class
services: the iTunes Music Store and App Store.

~~~
tomjen3
Sorry but those are not best in class. iTunes doesn't play nicely with windows
and there is no way to use my Ipod as an usb device, something that every
single mp3 player I have even brought did.

Face it, Apple makes shiny things but they are crap.

------
kierank
If Disney can create Fastpass, Apple can create something similar. But then
they won't end up in the newspapers and on tv.

------
epochwolf
How is this any different from any other high demand product?

~~~
ajscherer
In many similar situations people don't have reservations. Guaranteeing they
receive a product requires them to be one of the first people through the door
when the store opens. Taking reservations may have created the false
impression that one could show up later in the day without the need to wait in
a long line.

The other difference I can think of is that in similar situations the
manufacturer and the retailer are two completely separate entities. It's more
difficult for me to imagine getting angry at Nintendo because Best Buy is
making me wait in line.

I don't really see the point in taking reservations if people are going to
have to stand in line all day anyway.

~~~
timwiseman
_Taking reservations may have created the false impression that one could show
up later in the day without the need to wait in a long line._

I concur with you in everything you said, but I think it is important to
remember that that impression was false only because Apple arranged it that
way deliberately.

As others have stated, they knew the maximum number they could serve in a day
and could have refused to reserve more than that, or made reservations for
specific times of day and then ensured they had enough staff to cover those
reservations.

If they truly got overwhelmed by surprise (say some employees got sick), they
could have started handing out numbers so people could be free to walk away
for a bit and return closer to time based on their number. Etc.

------
ergo98
It is pretty surprising that Apple hasn't been called on this cheap PR. Every
person standing in line is being used as a stooge by Apple to get press, and
the media always abides. This is the first article I've seen yet that points
out this obvious exploitation of the Apple faithful.

It's positively archaic.

Just to be clear, as the article notes the people standing in line RESERVED a
phone. They already have their spot. Apple makes them prove it by standing in
line for 6 hours for the television cameras.

When the Motorola Droid was released, in comparison, I remember a lot of
articles mocking the lack of lines. Yet somehow they sold 250,000 in the first
week. It's kind of amazing what modern fulfillment processes can do, even if
it doesn't lead to cult-like turnouts.

~~~
eplanit
Makes one miss the truly passionate product fans of days gone by:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajlTIMBbdTg&feature=PlayL...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajlTIMBbdTg&feature=PlayList&p=B13069A3A910C603&playnext_from=PL&index=11)

~~~
makmanalp
Anyone know any studies on what makes people do this? How come a product
(especially a particularly stupid one that's not much different than its
analogues) gets so demanded before it comes out?

~~~
eru
There should be something about this in the PR literature. After all it's each
PR guys dream to create such a hype.

