I hate the Apple Store: a screed

The other day, I had to go to the Apple Store to buy something or other. This should have been a wonderful experience on the order of visiting Mecca. Wall-to-wall Apple products! The very store where Woz camped out in order to get an iPad the first day they were available! Gosh, maybe there'd be products there I'd never even thought of before! I could hardly wait.

When I arrived at the store, my first surprise was that it was insanely crowded, even during mid-afternoon on a weekday. I dislike crowds. "What are these people doing here?" I thought grimly, "Don't they have jobs? And if they don't have jobs, what in the heck are they doing blowing money on crap?"

My second surprise was that there was very little merchandise actually on display. Oh, there were tables with i-this and i-that chained down like a rabid tiger, but merchandise you could walk in, pick up, and actually pay for was confined to a couple of shelves. These shelves were quarantined at the back of the store, where you wouldn't run the risk of accidentally finding merchandise and, you know, buying it. That's probably just as well, since 90% of the shelves were filled with eleven million variations on iPhone cases. There was no sign at all of one of the things I wanted, a new stylus for my iPad.

Oh, ha ha. Speaking of "buying it," it wasn't exactly clear how one pulled that off. There was a "genius bar" at the back of the store but that didn't appear to be a place where one bought things. No cash registers. No cash registers anywhere, actually.

I flagged down someone who looked like an employee: "Excuse me, where do I need to go to pay?" Looking mildly annoyed, she waved in the general direction of a wall, or maybe the corner of one of the display tables. "Over there," she said. Okay. I walked over to the wall. There was something which looked like a small printer, but no apparent payment apparatus. Huh. Was I just stupid? Was I missing something? Maybe she meant the corner of the table.

I wandered around clutching the thing I'd come to buy, thinking about ditching it and going home. After a few minutes of increasing desperation, I approached the same person I'd spoken to earlier. This time she was definitely annoyed. "She's supposed to help you," I was informed, as she waved at another employee. Ah. Of course. Gosh. I don't know why I didn't figure that out before when she waved at the wall. Fortunately, when Ms. Annoyance saw that her fellow worker-bee was deep in conversation with a customer, she pulled out a handheld device, scanned the bar code on my product, and let me pay. If it hadn't been such a pain in the butt to get helped, I would have found the decentralized checkout fascinating.

What a negative, user-unfriendly experience from a company which built part of its reputation on usability and user friendliness.

Once home, I of course griped at my husband: "This kind of crap is why I don't go in stores, and I order everything online! It'll be a cold day in hell before I go back there!" He tried to explain that the Apple Stores are modeled on upscale jewelry stores, with a few exquisite things on display and employees wandering around to give assistance. He also mentioned in passing that *cough* perhaps I'm not cool enough for the kids who work at the Apple Store *cough*.

You know what? I don't give a (feces). Apple? You want my money? Make it easy for me to buy crap! I don't WANT contact with salespeople and I don't want to pass an intelligence test to figure out how to pay! I want to march in, pick out my thing, pay, and get out.

That's it. I'm back to buying everything online and having it delivered.