Your recounting of your experience is really far from mine. My local Apple Store (WTC in NYC) is very accessible and friendly. If anything, I find it mildly annoying to have to chit-chat with staff when I know what I want. With an appointment, support wait times are minimal and so far always helpful and friendly. I walk my dogs through the store sometimes, and even they love it!
My experiences at the Portland, Oregon Pioneer Place store are similar to GP. Come in the door, talk to an employee (sometimes there is a line, sometimes not), get shepherded over to another line and wait for a lot longer to see another employee, and then either wait a long time to get what you came for, if it's that easy, or they sit you down somewhere to wait until someone can really deal with you.
I don't go unless I have at least an hour of spare time and whatever I need can only reasonably be accomplished at the Apple Store. The place is a zoo, even if you're just browsing it's elbow to elbow.
The employees are nice, but I am aghast every time I go at how poor of an experience it is compared to what I think Apple should be capable of. Luckily when they do finally get to me, I've always had the issue solved (usually a new device) but up until that final encounter I just feel like a number. The fact that I have to stand on a concrete floor the entire time makes me double grumpy because my old-man feet do not like it one bit.
Similar experience in Perth, Australia. Apple is vastly more popular in 2019 than they were in 2009, so the magical Apple experience of seeing someone immediately & getting a while-you-wait repair is gone [1]. Even the appointment system is just choosing a time when you're allowed to come into the store to wait for half an hour until someone is available. They really need more stores & more staff, but that would eat into Apple's profits.
The one difference I've had is that I'm not even getting my issues resolved anymore. (Full sob story is in my comment history.) I'm typing this on a Thinkpad X1 and gave up on Apple after 15 years.
[1] Does anyone else remember when Apple would give you a coffee voucher for a local cafe while you were waiting, and send you a txt message to come back to the store once your MacBook Pro was fixed or replaced? They used to be magical, and they could afford to do all that because the machines were built for life & repairs were rare. That's all gone now.
There are now 900M iPhone users and 100M Mac users and 200M iPad users, while some may be overlap, there is give or take 1 Billion users Apple potentially serve. And yet they still only have 500 Stores, with more than half of them in US. So in terms of users and Store distribution US has a much better Ratio, and hence the favourable experience in the two previous reply, coming from US.
A long time ago ( I think it was 2015 ) I had expected Apple to reach 1000 Apple Store Worldwide by 2020. But just like every part of their infrastructure, ( CDN, Datacentre, Solar Energy, Recycling etc ) their "Asset-Light" strategy, being extremely conservative with any Asset has hold them back.
There are no seats in the stores near me. (or you have stools at specific benches that you need to give up when the apple employee tells you to). No place to have some small table space for yourself temporarily, if you have a jacket (often times wet from coming in from outside in the rain or snow, etc), there's no place to hang it. No use of washrooms. If you have a whole family of 4-5 who want to come by to learn how to use a computer, can you accommodate that? Or do you need to "book" the lesson table, make an appt with the genius bar etc. Is it only accessible for single people or couples with money?
Just those questions alone - think about what a gathering place is supposed to be! I think people are getting way too hoodwinked by marketing speak and are forgetting how an actual gathering space might function.
As a sales space, it's designed brilliantly. People come in, they see stuff they like, they want to buy it, pay money, sale done, time to go. That is perfected by the Apple store environment, but it is very much NOT a gathering space
I've always thought the sales experience was kinda crappy. I look around, decide I want to buy something, and then I hunt down an employee. Usually they're chatting with someone else so I wait until I can get their attention. Then, as long as it's just an accessory, I can buy it from them and leave. But if it's an iPhone, there's a whole process. I once managed to talk my way out of the store with a shrinkwrapped phone by insisting I actually was totally competent to set it up myself, but I almost had to beg.
I would find it a lot easier if they segregated the sales associates into two distinct group. One spot if all you want to do is buy and run, and another if you want the interactive experience. Then again, I'm a self-checkout kinda guy and I'd be even happier with some version of that.
In the UK, at least, you can serve yourself with the app - pick up your item, scan the barcode, pay with Apple Pay, and you're done. Might have to show the on-phone receipt to the door people too but I've only been asked once. Maybe this is why the Quick Checkout counter has gone?
Your idea of a town square is very foreign to me. I guess it’s a cultural divide, but I don’t think of a town square as a place to hang jackets and go to the toilet! More like killing time or people-watching while waiting to meet someone. You’re describing something like the highway rest areas I’ve visited in Japan.
Usually town squares also have facilities or hookups for preparing meals (whether indoors like a prep kitchen or outdoors like a fixed bbq pit or a stone pizza oven, or at least electrical and water hookups for portable setups). An outdoors town square might have a gazebo, or a tent covered area for gathering, space to keep jackets, a place to relieve yourself during your activity (ie if it's outdoors, portapotties, or outhouse/out-building or if indoors publicly accessible washrooms)
A place where community can gather for the purpose of talking/communing with one another, in a town square fashion. Protection from elements during the activity, etc.
My posts above were pertaining to indoors gathering spaces (hence the seats, hanging coats, etc) but either way, Apple stores do NOT resemble outdoors towns squares at all as well.
What OP describes is pretty common in the PNW, town squares or neighborhood squares will have a number of different seating areas, restrooms, hookups so you can have a food vendor or three without stringing electric cabling and water pipes everywhere, etc.
In SoCal, some towns like Oceanside have a very vibrant street fair that is very enjoyable.
FWIW, I grew up with such things in rural New England and the park an eighth of a mile of a subway stop here in Boston provides a similar value. I don't think this is just a European phenomenon--more of one where there is currently, or was recently, a sense of real community.
