Asymco’s Horace Dediu has put together a couple of charts showing that while the number of visitors to Apple’s retail stores continues to climb, the rate of growth is flattening off.
The underlying reason appears to be a slow-down in the rate at which Apple is opening new stores, as the average number of visitors per store has remained stable for the past three years …
Dediu also observes that the average spend-per-visitor has remained pretty constant at around $50 – Apple’s latest SEC filing shows that average revenue per store dipped marginally, from £51.5M to $50.2M.
Looking at the filing, we noted that while Apple opened 26 new stores in the last fiscal year, it added only 400 new retail staff during the same period, suggesting that full-time retail employee headcount per store may have been reduced.
All of this suggests that perhaps Apple slightly dropped the ball during its extended period without a retail head. With the appointment of Angela Ahrendts, and the “iPad Christmas” coming our way however, we’d imagine things are going to change.
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They had to hit the fire code at some point.
Used to enjoy going to the Apple Store. Now it’s hard to find a member of staff to answer any questions and the store is always full of kids playing on Facebook. Angela needs to take a firm grip on their retail side and shake it up, make it more of an “experience” and ban people from using Facebook which would get all the kids out and leave it for genuine customers.
In the London stores, there are separate iMacs for people to use for browsing, away from the product display ones, which always struck me as a good idea.
Apple Stores have been associated with repairs and unhelpful Geniuses for me, so much so that I dread going especially since some Geniuses recognize me and look at me weirdly.
I’m no longer impressed with the Apple stores. As soon as you say I’ll take it, they lose all interest in you and want you out of the store fast. After that it is totally self-serve. They are way way too full of themselves.