Star Trek

This blog was first published in Retail Week in response to another column.   
 
Dear John,

I read your column about the new Apple store with great interest. You ended it with "Or am I just being curmudgeonly?" I'm from the North, so I had to go to my Apple Air and type it into Google to find out what "curmudgeonly" means, I now know what it means.

The photos of the store look beautiful, we don't have a store like that up here, I can't wait to buy a cheap day return train ticket to visit Regent Street to look at the refurbished Apple store and the Burberry store I've heard so much about. I'll probably want to get my 'Prayer Mat' out and start praying to good design when I'm down there.

I was once talking to the Chancellor of our local University, and we began talking about our Apple phones, he then said "Have been visited the Apple store on 5th Avenue in New York?", " No" I replied, "You must go there on your next visit, it's stunning, it's worth a visit" I couldn't believe I was talking to someone about a shop.

The Chancellor at the University of Huddersfield is a local lad, Sir Patrick Stewart, I couldn't believe that Jean-Luc Picard of the Star Trek Enterprise was telling me to visit an Apple Store, he was telling how good it was, that's the Apple effect. (I was on the Governing Council at the University)

I'm the founder of Freeserve, and I was invited to the opening of the Apple Store and was there when it first opened and from the photographs of the refurbished store, it look's different from when it first opened.

​The big thing a lot of businesses get wrong is "Pivot", you need to keep changing. Lots of businesses only change after they have problems, read this magazine and look at examples of companies that are going through change because their customers are abandoning them. Apple stores are still busy because they go through a pivot when people are still shopping with them. Obviously, people don't understand this. And his comment about “Samsung are coming,” not a Samsung 7 on a plane I hope, you'd get arrested.