Report: Apple Retail Store Sales Take a Big Hit in 4Q08
5:05 pm, February 2nd, 2009, Lonnie Lazar
Image © Chris Chan
Apple Retail Stores’ same-store revenues – a key retail metric comparing sales of stores open for at least a year – fell 17.4% in the December quarter from a year earlier, according to a report at Barrons. That should come as no huge surprise, given the economic contagion sweeping the globe.
What’s interesting about the report, originally issued by Needham hardware analyst Charlie Wolf, is that Apple also turned in an extremely impressive sales-per-square-foot performance of $4700 for the year, highest among electronic retailers by far. Foot traffic at Apple’s brick and mortar emporiums was only down 1.8%. , indicating the computer giant’s products retain a certain cache for beleaguered consumers, who remain interested to touch and play with the bright and shiny things in Apple Stores, even if they can’t afford to buy them at previous rates.
Posted by Lonnie Lazar in News | Comment on this article
The South Center (mall) store in South Seattle just moved to a bigger store recently so I can’t compare the traffic from last year to this year.
The nicest way to put the size of the store last year was that it was a closet. It was maybe 9 feet wide if that. The new store is probably four times as wide and three times deeper (maybe 50 feet before and not including the back room area).
Last night I had to get a new power brick for my 800mhz G4 PowerBook and the store was definitely not crowded and there was only maybe a half dozen Apple employees there. All were busy but it wasn’t like there was a big line of people waiting to buy things. The queue for the Genius Bar was booked for the day when I got there (I had made an appointment).
While I was there people were buying some stuff. One lucky person was buying a 24″ iMac. I have a white one from Nov ‘06.
OlsonBW, on February 3rd, 2009 at 7:42 am