Apple Store employees are now expected to clap for you. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported in his September 13 Power On newsletter that staff are required to applaud as the first customers walk in each morning, and that small rule turns out to be part of a much larger overhaul of how Apple runs its stores.
Stand up, put the coffee down, and applaud
According to Gurman, Apple is enforcing stricter rules for employees during the morning meetings that happen before stores open. Staff are expected to remain standing, to refrain from drinking beverages or using devices, and to stay fully engaged throughout.
Then the doors open, which happens five minutes before the advertised time, and the entire team is expected to applaud the first customers as they enter. That applies regardless of role, so the person who was about to head into the stockroom claps too.
He does not say when these rules took effect or whether they apply to every country, so I would not assume either. It is also worth remembering that performance has always been part of the job in those stores, going back to the launch-day lines where blue-shirted staff cheered and high-fived people walking in with their pre-orders.
Morning meetings now come with rules about standing, drinks and devices. | Image by Apple
The stores themselves are being rebuilt around service
The behavioral rules showed up at the end of a much bigger item, which is that Gurman is told Apple plans to accelerate its store renovation program over the coming years. Three changes define the new look.
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Dedicated Genius Bars are coming back, built in an all-wood style with two counter heights for accessibility and storage drawers and product posters on the wall behind. The giant video walls at the back of many stores are coming out, and in many locations the Genius Bar is what replaces them.
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The third change is a pair of new 10-foot sections along the sides of the store, known internally as bays. One is a wooden pickup bay with secure drawers for online orders and a handoff table in front, and the other is a Today at Apple bay with an oversized display up top, equipment drawers below, and stools around a fixed instructor table.
The video walls are the part worth dwelling on, because they are a specific era being removed. Angela Ahrendts ran Apple retail from 2014 to 2019, and the floor-to-ceiling displays were the centerpiece of the next-generation store designs that rolled out under her, including the Union Square flagship in San Francisco with its custom 37-foot screen.
She was also the executive who described the stores as town squares rather than shops, and the seating areas and video walls existed to make that idea physical. Taking them out is not a refresh so much as an unwinding, and Apple has had six years since she left to decide it wanted the floor space back.
The room itself is being reorganized around service and pickup. | Image by Apple
What makes the return interesting is that everyone else in this business already went the other way. Best Buy has had a Geek Squad counter at the back of the store for two decades, and Samsung handles most walk-in repairs in the US through Best Buy's authorized service counters rather than a store of its own.
Microsoft, which built its retail chain on a layout that openly borrowed from Apple's, closed all of its physical stores in 2020. Service desks and pickup counters are what the rest of the industry kept, and Apple is the one that drifted toward the gathering-place model and is now walking back to the thing that pays for itself.
The rules arrive for a workforce that has pushed back before
None of this is happening in a vacuum. Apple's retail staff have organized and publicly raised concerns about working conditions in recent years, including a walkout over how stores were being run, which is the context mandatory standing and required applause arrive into.
Gurman does not connect the two, and I am not going to either. Rules about beverages and phones are ordinary retail policy almost anywhere else, of course, though scripted applause is the kind of detail employees tend to have feelings about.
Apple is unwinding the town-square era
I read back through the coverage of those next-generation store openings, and the gap between that pitch and this one is wide. The stores were sold as public spaces you might visit without buying anything, and what is replacing that is a repair counter, a pickup drawer and a fixed instructor table.
Both halves of this week's reporting point the same direction. The redesign changes what the room is for, and the morning rules change how the staff are expected to run it, and in both cases the answer is traditional retail discipline rather than community landmark.
What to watch from here
Apple has been testing these concepts internationally for about a year, and Gurman says the broader rollout runs over the next several years, so this arrives store by store rather than all at once.
I will admit I am glad the Genius Bar is coming back, since I have spent enough time hovering near a video wall waiting for my name to be called. If the applause makes it into my local store, I hope somebody tells the first customer of the day what is about to happen.
More on the Apple year these stores are gearing up for:
Johanna Romero is a Senior News Writer at PhoneArena, covering mobile technology news across Android, iOS, wearables, and the Google ecosystem she knows best. Drawing on 15 years in IT and tech support from 2007 to 2022, she brings a user-friendly eye for the practical features and lesser-known tricks readers care about. Google named her an official #TeamPixel member in 2022, and she also reviews the latest devices on her YouTube channel, JoJo the Techie.
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