For the last few years, I've been going from the Los Angeles area to Berkeley on business about once a month, and while there I frequently dropped by the nearby Apple Store in the Bay Street Emeryville development. My job responsibilities changed recently, so that I no longer make these trips, and I was starting to show withdrawal symptoms! Fortunately for me, an Apple Store opened at the Manhattan Village Mall in Manhattan Beach, California, a couple of miles from my home, on July 30th, 2005. Whew! Here is the storefront on the afternoon of the previous day; the windows were covered with taped-up brown paper, the Apple-logo facade was smudged with handprints from construction work, and the display area to the right of the store entrance was empty (with a big hole in the wall above it!).
The Grand Opening was at 10 a.m.; my family and I got there at 9 a.m., which was just about when the line really started growing. You can see that the storefront had been "unwrapped" and polished up; the display area to the right, between the Apple Store and the adjacent J. Jill store, is still unfinished. I learned that this display space belongs to the mall, which is why it wasn't spiffed up for the specific occasion of the opening of the Apple Store; however, the area behind it is leased to the Apple Store as stockroom space. (The mall maps still show the space occupied by the Apple Store and J. Jill as belonging to the previous tenant, New York & Company.)
When we arrived about an hour before opening, there were around a hundred people in line. The people at the very front of the line had arrived about 4:30 that morning! Most of them were inside the mall, cordoned off along the nearest wall and out the door; we were among the first to have to join the line outside.
But not the last! Just before the doors opened, I stepped out into the parking lot (leaving my wife to hold my place!) to photograph the line along the side of the Macy's store near the entrance...
...and around the next corner. I'd say there were several hundred people there when I went back to reclaim my place in line at 9:50 a.m., with more still arriving.
Once the doors opened, they let in a first group, and then more people by groups of ten or so in order to prevent the fire marshals from shutting us down! The store "felt" about the same size as my familiar Emeryville location (by the way, these two shopping complexes are owned by the same mall developer). Here we are looking from near the entrance toward the (busy!) cash register iMacs at the rear of the store, with the Genius Bar on the right (where people are seated), and product displays in the center and down the sides of the store.
There was also the usual wall o' software to the right rear, and a kids' area with iMacs set up with Harry Potter and other games. I remember back in th' day when the computers in this section were lumpy ol' eMacs; harrumph!
Here's a look back toward the entrance, with people still coming in the door as fast as they could be accommodated. In a "typical" Apple Store of this size, like the Emeryville one, the stockroom and employee areas would be behind the cash register, I am told; in this case, the relative shallowness of the retail space required them to set these areas up parallel to the long axis of the store, behind the Genius Bar.
Back outside, you can see that the main display out front focuses on the PowerBooks and the newly-revised iBooks, with a banner of (print) book spines and a library-style wheeled shelf ladder. The gent in the doorway in the green employee T-shirt is holding iPod-sized boxes containing Grand Opening T-shirts (white lettering on black) for the first thousand visitors. They ran out sometime after 11:00 a.m.; then, as my family and I had lunch in the nearby Islands restaurant, we saw the line finally clear and the ropes and posts being taken down about 11:30. I had described this event to a few "heathen" as being like the dedication of a new temple for the Cult of Mac; certainly the enthusiastic response of the local faithful caused some puzzlement for the other folks who came to the mall around opening time. This was the first Apple Store Grand Opening I'd had a chance to attend; it'll be nice to have one within bicycle distance of my home!
new 30 July 2005
