Yup, and Comp USA and Micro Center before that.
Yup
I Worked at compusa as a kid when they had their Apple “store within a store”.
compusa neglected the spaces. Understaffed, and routinely pulled away to the rest of the store constantly. And when people with Apple problems came in looking for help, they got dumped on the apple guys. Sales metrics were exempt for the Apple staff for a while, but that changed as time went on, and they would get hassled by management for not selling enough extended warranties on slow moving Apple stuff. The Apple sales people were compusa employees paid a little extra, with initially different performance metrics, and separate training. I recall regional Apple product people would visit but don’t remember if they worked for Apple or another “retail solutions” company, but they (regional Apple ) didn’t work for compusa. Scheduling was spot audited by Apple to ensure we had Apple staff on weekends but weekdays didn’t ensure Apple staffing iirc.
it was a nice idea, and exposed me to a lot of Apple stuff at a really cool time period (early 2000’s), but the execution was a **** show. The regional Apple reps were always cool, but always frustrated and overworked that compusa was such a a ****** “partner”. Also, the Apple section is where thieves would take products to remove them from boxes or blister packs to stuff them down their pants before walking out of the store. The Apple section was really just a stolen CD-R/W drive section.
When Apple Store opened in West Hartford, Apple poached all of the compusa Apple people. Good move for them.
I really grew an appreciation there for Apple engineering by being able to handle the old wall street G3’s, cubes, Tibooks, Mac g4 towers, G4 lampshade iMac, iCamera, etc, top notch product back in those days. Apple products had much more “emotion” back then. But it was also a different era of personal computing, so I don’t fault where Apple has moved since then in terms of the emotional connections to designs.
The best part of the Apple “store in a store” at comp, was the Apple zealots/evangelists that came in regularly as members of the public and sold more computers than the sales staff. Genuinely interesting, nice, and passionate people. I wish I had orbited their discussions more. But I could make $12 off a printer sale 2x an hour on a 4 hour shift, I wasn’t going to be hanging around in the Apple section. I’d be off selling whatever Epsom/HP/Lexmark Susie needed to print her kid’s history report and not trying to describe how to use FileMaker Pro to some old lady gifted a G3 iMac
Sorry for the blog post. Thought some of us would find that interesting, or a familiar memory.
