I'm a big Apple fan, but I am not excited about the cashwrap-free Apple Store experience. It feels disorganized and vaguely uncomfortable. I need the wall between "just browsing" and "ready to buy."

I suppose the consultative selling experience is fine for a high price-point item, like the new MacBook Pro that I desperately NEED. But I don't want to flag down a random blue-shirted Apple person with the magic credit card machine for a $10 purchase. This seems like a recipe for chaos during the holidays.

Plus, the buying experience is sloppy. I don't want to watch someone else fork over their credit card while I'm admiring hardware. And I don't want grubby boxes and shrinkwrap all over the store.

Buying my 3G was the most un-Apple experience I've had in the store. They unwrapped my beautiful phone, plonked down a laptop from under the counter and fired up the phone to call home to the mothership. Bleah. Can't I just take it to the front to pay?

Labels: apple, retail

I'm a total Apple Fanboy. But the new Amazon music store is pretty cool. It still needs a bit of polish with the browsing and finding music, but I've purchased a bunch of random CDs from them in the past two days. The lower prices are nice, and it seems to "just work", which is a quality I expect in both Apple and Amazon. Well done.

Labels: amazon, apple, music