Tomorrow the Apple Store will have an average of 130 employees working, plus about 30 regional support per store. Big stores slightly more, little stores a little less... so of those 160, about 100 will be dedicated to pickups\sales\activations\etc in regards to launch, the other 60 will be handling genius bar, stock, management, etc...
If you do the simple math, a store pickup should take no more than 5 minutes... literally show the ID, they type in the web order number, pull one off the stack (if past is any indication they don't associate your particular order with a serial until you pick up - this saves time in not having to find "your phone"), hand it over to you, you sign for having picked it up, and off you go.
If there are 100 employees working pickups, and those 100 do 20 pickups an hour, they collectively do 2000 per hour. No Apple Store gets enough of these iPhones for in-store pickup to take more than an hour or two... just think, 4000 phones in 2 hours.... they didn't get that many pre-orders in the average store for pickup.
So it'll all depend on how well they manage the lines. Hopefully they'll just push the in-store pickups to the front and bang em out one after the other. Should be quick and easy... but part of Apple's mode of operation is to create hype and hysteria, so it wouldn't surprise me if they made a spectacle out of the day to try and get more media than they're already getting.
I plan on getting there at 7 am. If the store opens at 8, I darn well better not still be there at 10 am. I'll have a real issue with that.
If you do the simple math, a store pickup should take no more than 5 minutes... literally show the ID, they type in the web order number, pull one off the stack (if past is any indication they don't associate your particular order with a serial until you pick up - this saves time in not having to find "your phone"), hand it over to you, you sign for having picked it up, and off you go.
If there are 100 employees working pickups, and those 100 do 20 pickups an hour, they collectively do 2000 per hour. No Apple Store gets enough of these iPhones for in-store pickup to take more than an hour or two... just think, 4000 phones in 2 hours.... they didn't get that many pre-orders in the average store for pickup.
So it'll all depend on how well they manage the lines. Hopefully they'll just push the in-store pickups to the front and bang em out one after the other. Should be quick and easy... but part of Apple's mode of operation is to create hype and hysteria, so it wouldn't surprise me if they made a spectacle out of the day to try and get more media than they're already getting.
I plan on getting there at 7 am. If the store opens at 8, I darn well better not still be there at 10 am. I'll have a real issue with that.
