The Apple Store and the Burrito
I’m going to talk about the Apple Store, but first I’m going to take a couple of minutes to talk about burritos. Stay with me, this will all make sense in a minute.
Back in 1993 a burrito place opened up around the corner from where I was working. Unlike most burrito places at the time, this place had a assembly line much like a Subway Sandwiches location. Unlike any Subway I’d ever been in, however, the place was built for speed and there were, seemingly, and over-abundance of people behind the counter. A Subway might have only one or two people working, but this place almost always had four or five, two making burritos, one at the register, and one or more in the back cooking meat. The menu was simple, you could get a burrito. Your had a choice of meats, salsa, and beans and that was about it. The burritos were large, a little bit more expensive than competitor’s, but obviously made with better quality meat, and more of it. And they were fast. Really fast. The place was built for speed and staffed for speed.
Even today, if I go to a regular takeout place to get a burrito, it might take 5-6 minutes for some unseen person in the back to make that burrito and then someone to bring it up to me, put it in a bag, and then ring me up.
The burrito place was Chipotle, and they have built a national chain based on, according to them, high quality ingredients. I think that more important than the ingredients is the fact that they took a process and pared it down to be as easy for the consumer to buy as it was possible to do. You could easily walk in and be eating in 60 seconds, and the burrito was made to order. Ordering in a Chipotle was often faster than ordering in a so-called fast-food restaurant with pre-cooked burger patties.
The Chipotle model was not new, Subway had been doing the same sort of setup for years, but they didn’t understand what Chipotle understood, that the faster you serve people the more money you make.
And this is where the Apple Store comes in. From a purely cynical point-of-view everything about the Apple Store is designed to make spending money as simple and fast as possible. And the secet is that is what customers want. Once they have decide to buy something, they don’t want to be faced with hauling it to the registers and standing in line and getting rung up and dealing with the horrible POS systems (they say it means Point of Sale, but I think piece of Shit is far more accurate). No, once someone has decided to buy something that is, for them, the end of the process. Everything after that is simply an unnecessary delay.
My last large purchase at an Apple Store was $750 and took about 10 minutes, largely because the store was packed with people buying the new iPad 2. Before that I was in an Apple Store on Black Friday for a $1500 dollar purchase that took less than 5 minutes.
Can you imagine any store, anywhere, were you can spend that much money that fast? You can, only if you’ve been in an Apple Store.
Let me say it again, the faster you serve people the more money you make. Chipotle and Apple have this process down to a science that no one else in retail seems to understand, much less duplicate.
Everywhere there is an Apple Store it is the most profitable retail space within miles. People look at the design of the stores and think maybe that’s why, so they dress their employees in t-shirts and put lanyards around their necks (hello, Microsoft Store) but then when you go to buy something they take you to a counter and ring you up on a computer register that is, really, not that different from the cash registers in the General Store on Little House on the Prairie. They don’t get it.
Every employees in the Apple Store is able to take your credit card, swipe it, and email you a receipt in seconds. When you are ready to buy something, the process is astonishingly fast. This is retail in the 21st century but only Apple and Chipotle have gotten there with a process that maximizes speed above all else.
Well, not all else, there is also quality.
Both companies focus on providing the best quality product they can. Chipotle has used its buying muscle to get organic meats and vegetables, to get producers to give them meat and diary free from hormones, and yet they manage to keep their product pricing competitive with others who are producing inferior product from inferior ingredients. Similarly, Apple is producing superior computers to their competitors and is also making a lot more money than them. Dell, for example, tried to market a competitor to the original Mac Book Air which was about the same price, and near the same specs, but didn’t sell very well. When Apple updated the MBA, Dell threw up its hands and discontinued their model, unable to compete.
But if you want to know why the Apple Store (which was doomed to failure by every analyst on the planet when Apple first announced them) is such a success, don’t look at the t-shirts and the lanyards and the uncluttered tables showing off their product, look at the buying experience. The shorter the interval between deciding to buy something and walking out of the store, the better for everyone involved.
And by the way, this is not something new. In fact, this sort of rapid sales was pioneered by, of all things, the Department Store. The entire reason for the department store was that you could go to a department, and buy a hat, and then to another and buy some shoes, and then to another and buy a coat. Each department had staff their to help you, and to make the sale when and if you decided to buy. Hard to believe, but that is what those stores where like decades ago.
Now you go to a store and you spend more than half your time just trying to find someone who can ring you up, much less finding someone who is knowledgeable and helpful before then.
The fast you sell, the more you sell, but the key is that the speed has to be all loaded into the period of time after the buying decision is made. You can’t try to speed up the shopping part because then people feel rushed. They want to make the decision to buy in their own time, so the secret is to be able to latch on to that moment when they have decided and sell rapidly and efficiently at that point.
And this means that if I walk into a store and I know what I want, I should not be spending ,amy minutes trying to find it, trying to find someone to help me, and trying to find someone to pay. The longer this takes, the less likely I am to come back.
When I needed an HDMI cable I never even considered going to a Big Box store like Best Buy. One, their inventory is so sporadic I am never sure if basic supplies like cables will be at any particular store, but most importantly, I didn’t want to deal with their lines which in my experience are long and glacial.
Apple Store. In and out in a couple of minutes.
“Hi, welcome to the Apple Store, are you looking for anything in particular?”
“Yeah, I need an HDMI cable.”
“Let me show you were those are.”
Walk back to where the cable are, there’s the HDMI cable.
“Great,” I say, as I hand the blue t-shirt my credit card.
Swipe.
“Did you want me to email your reciept?”
“Yep, that would great, thanks.”
And I walk out of the store—I don’t even have a bag—but by the time I get to the door, my iPhone makes the “You’ve got mail!” sound and I have my receipt.
