“We are the most humble store on the Upper West Side,” said Ron Johnson, the senior vice president of Apple’s retail effort, capping a 45-minute presentation filled with a staggering supply of stupendous superlatives about the first decade of the Apple Store.
The occasion was a news conference in advance of the opening on Saturday of Apple’s fourth New York location, on Broadway, a block north of Lincoln Center.
It is the “lowest building on the Upper West Side,” he said. Under an arched 45-foot-high all-glass ceiling, held up by marble walls, is “the largest floor of Apple products anywhere in the world,” Mr. Johnson said.
It actually looked like the central study hall in the library of a very wealthy college, with 16 long tables, mostly covered with laptops.
Down the all-glass spiral staircase is the “largest room ever for service.” That is a basement filled with a 45-foot-long genius bar and another 16 tables, some of them only knee high.
Mr. Johnson said this room would would be used for special events and classes focused on kids and the arts.
“The store is a wonderful place for someone to come in from the winter, hang up their coat and spend a couple of hours making the next great movie,” he said.
Mr. Johnson also announced plans for the chain’s future. It will open 40 to 50 stores in nine countries in its 2010 fiscal year, which began in September, compared with 26 in the previous year. Four of them will be what it calls “significant stores” in major cities, the kind that are built with architectural flourishes. Those are going to London and Paris, with Shanghai getting two.
Apple recently opened its first Paris store, a significant one of course, with its signature glass spiral staircase under I.M. Pei’s signature glass pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre.
Even the new stores Apple opens in malls will be larger, at least three tables wide instead of two, he added.
Mr. Johnson did concede that Apple’s 281 retail outlets are “the highest performing retail stores on the planet.” For the year ending in September, the chain had total revenue of $6.6 billion and profit of $1.4 billion.
That works out to $26 million in sales per store. Mr. Johnson said that was nearly as much as the $28 million taken in by the average Macy’s, which has 30 times more floor space.
Of the 170 million people who wandered into an Apple store last year, 1 million of them were Windows users who walked out with their first Mac, the company said.
That fact, of course, hasn’t gone unnoticed in Redmond, Wash. Microsoft has just started building its own chain of stores.
When asked by a reporter about the new competition, Mr. Johnson replied humbly.
“Retail is hard,” he said. “I’m glad we have a 10-year start.”
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