Buying a 3G iPhone at the Fifth Avenue Apple Store

Yesterday, I headed to the eye doctor for an exam, and
because of the intensive and invasive nature of that experience, I’m usually no good for anything the rest of the day because I can’t really see anything, so I lower myself to eating snacks and caterwauling. As I withdrew from the Second Avenue office of my torture — eyes red and dilated and throbbing — I wondered what in the world I could do that would take little or no effort but still pack in some fun?  I decided to hop into a cab and head uptown to the flagship 24/7/365 Apple Store on Fifth Avenue and doggedly wait in line for a couple of new 3G iPhones.

I was on site by 10:16am and there was a small line forming outside the glorious Fifth Avenue Apple Store and I felt that, perhaps, I had arrived just early enough to be in and out in 30 minutes.

Boy, was I wrong.

Apple needs to become better at learning how to form and manage lines.  You don’t wait inside the Apple Store for your iPhone 3G.  You wait on the sidewalk in the heat and hot sun.  Apple employees drink water in front of you as you bake and sweat in the heat.

As I tried to figure out how to join the iPhone queue — there are no signs or people instructing you on where to go or what to do — I finally saw a couple of Apple store employees in garish orange and blue t-shirts — at&t colors… ugh! — at the front of the metal people barriers that were managing a growing, snaking, queue and the workers were turning away 80% of the people from getting a place in line because they did not live in the United States.

If you passed the first Apple “Where Do You Live?” Sniff Test, you were given a small ticket — a laundry ticket, really — and that ticket had a date and a time on it that allowed you to come back later for more Apple Sniffing and line standing.

I was given a 1:00pm ticket for later in the day and told to “come back at 12:45pm” to get in line.  It was currently 10:29am.  I had to kill two hours before I could go back and stand in line.

Apple are extremely pleased with their new “Queue Policy” of giving you a ticket and turning you away and they will not hesitate to tell you how wonderful it is to not have to wait around and stand in line.

I — not a good stander-in-liner — argue that having to wait around to get access to stand in a line in two hours is, actually, standing in line but you can do it in Central Park instead of on Fifth Avenue and 59th Street.

Your time may artificially be yours, but there’s no guarantee you’ll get an iPhone and there’s no reservation policy tied to a specific iPhone serial number that would just allow you to walk into the store at 1pm.  No.  You come back in two hours to stand in that long line on the sidewalk.

With stinging eyes and weary eyelids, I made my way onto a bench in Central Park and decided to do my best to be visually inspired by a great Garrison Keillor piece I read the week before about the summer pleasures of living in New York City:

July 23, 2008 | New York in July, hot and breezy, the smell of pizza
and coffee in the air, and on the subway one is surrounded by women in
light summer dresses, the bare shoulders of elegant young urban women
whose shoulders tell you they never toted barges or lifted bales, never
laid eyes on a barge or a bale except for someone barging into their
office and giving them a baleful look.

They are swanning along through
their 20s and I love to look at them while observing the No Staring
rule, five seconds max — but five seconds of a beautiful New York
woman burns an image on your retina that will see you through the
miseries of the city.

I am pleased to report my red retinas were sufficiently burned by my two-hour wait.  The swanning women were, indeed, graceful and incredibly beautiful.  I was also surprised to learn in my informal survey that 99.99% of the young women sliding along and speaking a foreign language in winsome shorts and ugly flip-flops — were dark-haired and black eyed.  There was nary a blonde — real or bottle — in the bunch.  It was then I pondered the Artificial Mechanization of American beauty until I realized I had to head back to the Apple store to stand in line.

Arriving back on the Apple Store scene at 12:30pm found two bursting queues.  There was the “real” Apple queue in metal people barricades and the growing 1pm line that formed in the eating area of the plaza outside the store.  One Apple Manager came outside and asked one of the blue and orange Apple workers, “What’s that second line?”  The furtive answer was, “It’s the 1pm line.”  The manager sighed and turned around and walked the other way.

It looked like Apple were allowing 7-10 people in the store at a time and around 50 people were still standing in the “Noon Queue” waiting to get in and it was taking 20-30 minutes to send in the next bunch of buyers.  I was glad I got there at 12:30pm instead of 12:45pm because I was one of the first ten in line for the 1pm queue.

At 1:10pm, the 1pm queue were allowed to snake around the metal people barriers and join the official iPhone queue with the remaining Nooners.  Each of us were warned by the waiting Nooners to not trip over the metal barricades as we picked our way in line and most of us, including me, did trip over the metal legs piercing the empty space where you are expected to walk.

Then the second Apple Sniffing began as a grinning Apple worker wended his way down the line asking each of us if we were United States citizens — the TSA could take lessons in how to do a successful immigration interview just by smiling and nodding like our Apple interrogator — and if you were a citizen, then you were asked a laundry list of other questions all designed to get your out of the queue and shorten the line.  If you weren’t the primary account holder, you were out.  If you didn’t have your social security number or photo ID you were out.  If you were trying to transport your phone number from another carrier to at&t, you were pretty much expected to the honorable thing and drop out because it would take forever to process you… even though you didn’t have to leave if you were stubborn about it…

At 1:28pm the first of the 1pm line were allowed to enter the Apple store to stand in yet another line!  You handed over your laundry ticket reservation to a sullen and unhappy looking black-shirted Apple security worker who gave everyone the evil eye as if we were illegal immigrants looking to steal American iPhones.

Here’s a beautiful image of the interior of the Fifth Avenue Apple Store.  The iPhone queue was located way over there by the blue LCD screens in the wall and the place was packed — PACKED! — with workers and buyers and it was loud with music blaring from iPod docking devices.  You couldn’t hear anything.  You could barely move.  It was the absolute definition of a Mad House.  Not my scene at all, but Apple forced me there and it makes you a little bitter to be pushed around three queues just to buy a cellphone.